Weekend Roundup [100 - 109]Sunday, January 27, 2019
Weekend Roundup
Trump's lockout ended on Friday, for three weeks, anyway. I wouldn't
make a big deal about Trump blinking or caving. He's a born bully, and
still dangerous, so you'd just be taunting him. On the other hand, I'm
pretty much convinced that the purpose of the lockout was to try to
intimidate the new Democratic House, so we might as well acknowledge
that in that regard he failed. Perry Bacon Jr. explains
Why Trump Blinked, although the info graphic on "Trump Approval
Ratings" is probably all you need to know: approve, 39.4%; disapprove,
56.0%. Those are his worst numbers since the 2016 election, and those
numbers have never been above water.
Another big story was the much anticipated indictment and arrest
of Roger Stone. My right-wing cousin on Facebook: "Gestapo tactics
used against Roger Stone! A old man, his wife and a dog. A SWAT team
in full gear for arresting! For shame F.B.I." Of course, Stone's not
the first guy who's been Gestapoed by the FBI. That's pretty much
their standard operating procedure. I can't even especially blame them
here, given that the NRA has pretty much guaranteed that every criminal
in America will be armed. The risk, of course, is that a half-cocked
SWAT team member will freak out and kill someone for no good reason.
We had a prime example of that here in Wichita, about a year ago.
Still, the bigger story is the coup that Trump & Co. tried to
pull off in Venezuela. This one was a bit unorthodox. Normally, one
tries to secure power first, then quickly recognize the plotters to
help them consolidate power. This time Trump recognized the coup
before there were any "facts on the ground," thereby alerting Maduro
to the plot. As I recall, GW Bush recognized a coup in Venezuela [in
2002] that ultimately failed, but even he wasn't as premature as
Trump.
This coup has been preceded by decades of vitriolic propaganda
aimed at delegitimizing the democratically elected Chavez and Maduro
governments. This has made it very difficult to know what reports
are fair and accurate. On the other hand, the historical record is
clear that the US has long exploited Venezuela (and virtually every
other country in Latin America), leading to chronic poverty, extreme
inequality, and harsh repression nearly everywhere -- and this has
long made me sympathetic to political movements, like Chavez's, that
have sought to halt and undo neo-liberal predation (even in cases
where I don't particularly approve of the tactics). Whatever the
facts here, Trump's actions are fully consistent with US policy of
more than a century, and as such should be opposed.
Some links on Venezuela:
George Ciccariello-Maher:
Venezuela: Call it what it is -- a coup. Susan B Glasser:
We interrupt this crisis: Trump, Venezuela, and the crazy politics of
the shutdown:
In typical Trump fashion, the decision about Venezuela happened quickly,
at the last minute, and apparently without the normal process that would
have accompanied such a significant move in any other Administration. . . .
[Senator Marco Rubio] demanded that the Trump Administration recognize
Guaidó as the country's interim leader. Rubio's prodding, along with that
of exile groups, sent the Administration "scrambling," McClatchy News
reported. . . . Just a few hours later, Trump went ahead and did it,
joined by a strong lineup of other countries, including many of
Venezuela's neighbors, as well as Canada and France. . . . In fact,
Trump, who governs by personal instinct, has had an odd obsession with
Venezuela from early on in his Administration, when Rubio brought the
wife of the jailed opposition leader Leopoldo López to make an in-person
appeal to Trump in the Oval Office. Trump professed his willingness to
take military action against Venezuela in the summer of 2017, at the
same golf-course photo opportunity where he threatened to rain down
"fire and fury" on North Korea. . . . In the absence of long-standing
views on many foreign-policy issues, the President has chosen, as he
so often does, to personalize things with Venezuela. Rubio has figured
that out, and adroitly played off it, especially since the Trump
personnel shuffle last spring, which brought two like-minded hard-liners
into the Administration's key foreign-policy jobs: John Bolton, as the
national-security adviser, and Mike Pompeo, as Secretary of State. Both
had advocated tough measures against the leftist regime of Maduro's
mentor and predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Now, with Venezuela descending
into political and economic crisis, members of both parties, including
those, like Rubio, who have been wary of Trump's America First and
damn-the-allies approach to much of the rest of the world, are
supportive of Trump's decision.
Greg Grandin:
How the right is using Venezuela to reorder politics. Jake Johnson:
Ben Norton:
Jon Queally:
While criticizing Maduro, Sanders says US should 'not be in the business
of regime change' in Venezuela: Sanders points out, "The United States
has a long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries.
We must not go down that road again." Michael Selby-Green:
Venezuela crisis: Former UN rapporteur says US sanctions are killing
citizens. Nahal Toosi:
Elliott Abrams, prominent DC neocon, named special envoy for Venezuela.
Leave it to Trump to pick an envoy with a 100% track record of putting
his personal ideological concerns over practical national interests, and
a 0% track record of negotiating the end of any conflicts. Alex Ward:
Some more scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
2 winners and 3 losers in the deal to end the government shutdown:
Winners: Nancy Pelosi, air traffic controllers. Losers: Donald Trump,
DREAMers, basic rationality and people who like to plan.
Elizabeth Warren's proposed tax on enormous fortunes, explained.
Pete Buttigieg announces his 2020 presidential campaign: Democrat,
mayor of South Bend, IN, and seems to be pretty impressive in that role,
but doesn't have a lot of good opportunities for advancement.
Elizabeth Warren's book, The Two-Income Trap, explained: She
wrote a number of books before getting into politics, and this one from
2004, so-authored by Amelia Warren Tyagi (her daughter), was her first
to attempt a non-academic audience: The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class
Parents Are Going Broke. Lara Bazelon:
Kamala Harris Was Not a 'Progressive Prosecutor'. Jacob Bogage:
Daniel Snyder's new $100 million purchase is the first superyacht with a
certified Imax movie theater. Still, this pales next to Jerry Jones'
"$250 million, 357-foot superyacht." One thing that especially struck me
in Paul Krugman's discussion of "the great compression" was the virtual
disappearance of yachts among the rich c. 1960 (you know, back when the
top-bracket marginal income tax was 90%). Julian Borger: and others:
How Trump has changed America in two years. Robert L Borosage:
Watch how progressives respond when Trump isn't wrong: "Occasionally
the president finds himself on the right side of an issue, and Democrats
can't reflexively act." But, of course, many do. Arielle Brousse:
I'm from Atlantic City. I've seen how Donald Trump's false promises
devastate a community. Robert A Caro:
The secrets of Lyndon Johnson's archives. Aida Chávez:
Congress is pushing sanctions against supporters of Syria's Bashar
Al-Assad. Two obvious problems here: one is that the US has no
business unilaterally imposing sanctions on foreigners; the second is
that this guarantees that the US will continue to be hostile to Syria,
making it harder for Assad to restore order and rebuild the country,
and making sure the US will be unable to do anything constructive.
The fact is that Assad won. Reasonable people should try to work with
him: withdraw foreign support for opposition groups, and try to work
out amnesty/exile agreements rather than risk harsh repression (which
will lead to more resistance, and more terrorism). Adam Davidson:
Robert Mueller got Roger Stone: One of the week's big stories, but
it's been obvious that Stone was going down almost from the start of
the investigation. David Dayen:
Trump's CFPB fines a man $1 for swindling veterans, orders him not to
do it again. Gaby Del Valle:
Amazon is asking companies to create new, Prime-exclusive brands.
This is basically a tactic aimed at consolidating and reaping rents
from monopoly power. If/when Washington gets serious about antitrust
enforcement, prohibiting this is a good place to start. Tara Golshan:
The government is going to reopen. But what's next is going to be
tricky. Karl Grossman:
Darth Trump: Pushing to turnspace into a war zone. Sean Illing:
If you want to understand the age of Trump, read the Frankfurt School:
Interview with Stuart Jeffries, author of Grant Hotel Abyss: The Lives
of the Frankfurt School. I read a lot of Frankfurt School 35-40 years
ago, but have hardly cracked open a book since. I did pick up Dialectic
of Enlightenment a few months back, and noticed that I had underlined
close to half of the book, which provides inadvertent testimony to how deep
I once found it. I quit mostly because I got to where I wasn't learning
new things -- I had internalized their critical stance to such a point I
could anticipate how they would handle any new problem. Still, I'm not
sure they very useful insights into Trump. On the other hand, the history
is bound to be interesting. They're a generation of left intellectuals
who fled Fascism and found something nearly as ominous in America. Trump
easily reminds people of the former, but understanding the latter is more
important, and harder. Paul Krugman:
Robert Mackey:
The plot against George Soros didn't start in Hungary. It started on Fox
News. Michaelangelo Matos:
Fault Lines is an excellent history of US political dysfunction:
Short review of book by Kevin M Kruse and Julian E Zelizer, Fault
Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974. Dylan Matthews:
24 years ago today, the world came disturbingly close to ending. John Nichols:
Trump is entering the terrible twos -- the tantrums are going to get
worse. Gail Pellett:
Gringos without a car -- an ecological decision pays off in cultural
literacy. Robert Reich:
James Risen:
Roger Stone made his name as a dirty trickster, but the Trump-Russia coverup
may finally bring him down. Joshua Rothman:
How to escape pseudo-events in America: The lessons of Covington. Amanda Sakuma:
Gabriel M Schivone:
Why are Guatemalans seeking asylum? US policy is to blame. Headline
could be clearer. US policy is why they flee Guatemala. Why they come
here is harder to say. Perhaps because Americans are so insulated from
the effects of their government abroad? Matt Taibbi:
Jeffrey Toobin:
The dirty trickster: "Campaign tips from the man who has done it all."
Long profile on Roger Stone. The length attests to how long this story has
been anticipated. Tim Wu:
Antitrust's most wanted: "The 10 cases the government should be
investigating -- but isn't." Only keeps it down to ten by including
four whole industry segments. Li Zhou:
Why the government shutdown finally ended: "Floundering government
services, sagging approval ratings, and a failed Senate vote all became
too much for even Trump to take." Ben Zimmer:
Roger Stone and 'Ratf--ing': A Short History.
PS: I asked for comments
last week
on a possible book outline, and got essentially zilch back. To save
you the trouble of a click, I'll just paste them in here:
One thing I feel I need to decide this week (or, let's say, by the end
of January, at latest) is whether I'm going to try to write my unsolicited
advice book for Democrats in 2020. Say it takes three months to write, two
to get edited and published, that gets us to July, by which time we'll
probably have a dozen Democrats running for President. (I'm counting four
right now: Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and Tulsi
Gabbard;
Wikipedia lists more I wasn't aware of, plus an announcement pending
from Kamala Harris tomorrow.)
[Ballotpedia
lists eight "notable" declared/exploratory Democratic candidates.]
But that's just a measure of how soon what
Matt Taibbi likes to call "the stupid season" will be upon us. I have no
interest in handicapping the race, or even mentioning candidates by name.
I'm more interested in historical context, positioning, and what I suppose
we could call campaign ethics: how candidates should treat each other, the
issues, the media, the voters, and Republicans. And note that the book is
only directed toward Democrats who are actually concerned enough to get
involved in actual campaigns. Even there, it won't be a "how to" book. I
don't really know anything about running a campaign. It's more why we need
candidates in the first place, and what those candidates should say.
Some rough ideas for the book:
I'm thinking about starting off with a compare/contrast between Donald
Trump and George Washington. They are, by far, the richest Americans ever
to have won office, and otherwise couldn't be more unalike (unless I have
to deal with GW's ownership of slaves, which suggests some similar views on
race). The clearest difference is how we relate to money, and how we expect
politicians with money to serve. I'd probably follow this up with brief compare/contrasts between Trump
and selected other presidents. I might find various presidents that offer
useful contrasts on things like integrity, diligence, intelligence, care,
a sense of responsibility, a command of details, tolerance of corruption.
I doubt I'd find any president Trump might compare favorably to, but it
might be helpful to make the effort. Then I want to talk about political eras. Aside from Washington/Adams,
there are four major ones, each dominated by a party, each with only two
exceptions as president:
- From 1800-1860, Jefferson through Buchanan, interrupted only by two Whig
generals (and their VPs, since both died in office, Harrison especially
hastily).
- From 1860-1932, Lincoln through Hoover, interrupted only by two two-term
Democrats (Cleveland and Wilson).
- From 1932-1980, Roosevelt through Carter, interrupted only by two two-term
Republicans (Eisenhower and Nixon/Ford).
- From 1980-2020, Reagan through Trump, interrupted only by two two-term
Democrats (Clinton and Obama).
There's quite a bit of interesting material I can draw from those periods.
Each starts with a legendary figure, and ends with a one-term disaster. (I
suppose you could say that about Washington/Adams as well, but that's a
rather short descent for an era.) In each, the exceptions substantially
resemble the dominant party. But the Reagan-to-Trump era does reflect an
anomaly: each of the first three eras started with a shift to a broader
and more egalitarian democracy, whereas Reagan was opposite. Each era had
a mid-period nudge in the same direction (Jackson/Van Buren, Roosevelt,
Kennedy/Johnson, but also GW Bush). Of course, the anti-democratic tilt
of Reagan-to-Trump needs some extra analysis, both to show how it could
run against the long arc of American history and why after 1988 it was
never able to post commanding majorities (as occurred in previous
eras).
I then posit that in 2020 the goal is not just to defeat Trump
but to win big enough to launch a new (and overdue) era. This will be
the big jump, but I think if Democrats aim big, they can win big --
and it will take nothing less to make the necessary changes. This is
possible because Republicans, both with and without Trump, have boxed
themselves into a corner where all of their beliefs and commitments
only serve to further hurt the vast majority of Americans. It will be
tough because Republicans still have a stranglehold on a large segment
of the public. But this spell can be broken if Democrats look beyond
the conciliatory tactics and marginal goals that marked the campaigns
of Obama and the Clintons. At some point this segues into a lesson on the need for unity
and tolerance of diversity within the Democratic Party. I'll probably
bring up Reagan's "11th commandment," which served Reagan well but
has since been lost on recent Tea Partiers and RINO-bashers (although
the post-election fawning over Trump suggests that Republicans will
come around to backing anything that wins for them). I'll probably wind up with a brief survey of issues, which
will stress flexibility and feedback within a broad set of principles.
I can imagine later doing a whole book on this, but this would just
offer a taste.
Book doesn't need to be more than 300 pages, and could be as short
as half that. It is important to get it out quickly to have any real
impact. I would consider working with a co-author, especially someone
who could carry on to do much of the promotion -- something I'm very
unlikely to be much good at.
While I can imagine that this could be worth doing, I can also think
of various reasons not to bother. The obvious one is that I haven't been
feeling well, having a good deal of back pain, and having a trouble with
my eyes -- things that have taken a toll from my normal workload over
the last few months. I also seem to be having more difficulties coming
up with satisfactory writing. I spent a lot of time yesterday trying
to write up a response to a particularly annoying Facebook rant, and
never did come up with anything I felt like sharing. I am especially
bothered by self-destructive arguments I see both on the left and the
right of the Democratic Party spectrum, and this sometimes tempts me
to throw up my hands and leave you all to your fates. On the other
hand, sometimes this tempts me to think that all the help you need
is a little clarity that I fancy I can provide.
Just knocked this much off the top of my head, in two sets of a
couple hours each, so this is very rough. Next step will be to try
to flesh out a bit more outline, maybe 3-5 times the length, with a
lot of bullet points. That would be the goal for the next 7-10 days.
If I manage that, I'll circulate it to a few friends, then make a
decision whether to proceed. The alternative project at this point
is probably a memoir, which is something that can take however much
time it takes (or however much I have left).
Comments welcome, and much appreciated.
I haven't made any notable progress in the intervening week, which
is probably not a good sign. I have started reading Ben Fountain's
book, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and
Revolution, which is mostly reportage of the 2016 campaign, but
a cut above, partly the writing -- Fountain is best known for his
novel (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk) -- and partly because
he pays as much attention to the public as to the politicians. (The
paperback subtitle is Trump's Rise to Power and the State of the
Country That Voted for Him. I can't say it's helped me a lot in
thinking about my book, but does keep my head somewhat in the game.
Other books I've read on the 2016 election and/or Trump (latest to
oldest):
- Katy Tur: Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign
in American History
- Allen Frances: Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes
the Age of Trump
- David Frum: Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American
Republic
- Mark Lilla: The Once and Future Liberal
- Mark Singer: Trump and Me
- Jonathan Allen/Amie Parnes: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's
Doomed Campaign
- Bernie Sanders: Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In
- Matt Taibbi: Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016
Circus
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, January 20, 2019
Weekend Roundup
The shutdown, or as
David Frum put it, "the President's hostage attempt," goes on,
revulsing and alienating government workers and the public on top
of the revulsion and alienation they first felt when he took office
and started to self-destruct the government. (The exception, or so
we're told, is the ICE border agent union, which relishes the idea
of moving from the backwaters of law enforcement to the closest
thing we've ever had to Hitler's SS.) As I've noted before, the
first and foremost job of every Chief Executive is to keep things
working. In many regards Trump had already broken the organizations
he was responsible for running before he shuttered offices and
halted paychecks (e.g., see the story below on EPA prosecutions).
His new cudgel is blunter, and dumber.
The first thing that popped into my mind when Trump insisted on
shutting down the government is that this is why we don't negotiate
with terrorists. Except I couldn't use that, because I believe that
we should negotiate with terrorists, with hostage-takers, with all
manner of brutes and bullies. I'd even be willing to quote Winston
Churchill, something about "jaw-jaw" being better than "war-war."
But Trump sees this as a test of power, to be resolved by bending
Congressional Democrats into submission. The reason terrorists have
such a poor reputation for negotiating is that, like Trump, they're
insatiable. Republicans have played this budget chokehold card many
times since 1995, always coming back for more, so what Trump is
doing is completely in character. The difference this time is that
Democrats didn't win a major election just to let Trump trod all
over them. They were voted in to resist Republican tyranny, and
this is their first serious test.
One thing I feel I need to decide this week (or, let's say, by the end
of January, at latest) is whether I'm going to try to write my unsolicited
advice book for Democrats in 2020. Say it takes three months to write, two
to get edited and published, that gets us to July, by which time we'll
probably have a dozen Democrats running for President. (I'm counting four
right now: Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and Tulsi
Gabbard;
Wikipedia lists more I wasn't aware of, plus an announcement pending
from Kamala Harris tomorrow.) But that's just a measure of how soon what
Matt Taibbi likes to call "the stupid season" will be upon us. I have no
interest in handicapping the race, or even mentioning candidates by name.
I'm more interested in historical context, positioning, and what I suppose
we could call campaign ethics: how candidates should treat each other, the
issues, the media, the voters, and Republicans. And note that the book is
only directed toward Democrats who are actually concerned enough to get
involved in actual campaigns. Even there, it won't be a "how to" book. I
don't really know anything about running a campaign. It's more why we need
candidates in the first place, and what those candidates should say.
Some rough ideas for the book:
I'm thinking about starting off with a compare/contrast between Donald
Trump and George Washington. They are, by far, the richest Americans ever
to have won office, and otherwise couldn't be more unalike (unless I have
to deal with GW's ownership of slaves, which suggests some similar views on
race). The clearest difference is how we relate to money, and how we expect
politicians with money to serve. I'd probably follow this up with brief compare/contrasts between Trump
and selected other presidents. I might find various presidents that offer
useful contrasts on things like integrity, diligence, intelligence, care,
a sense of responsibility, a command of details, tolerance of corruption.
I doubt I'd find any president Trump might compare favorably to, but it
might be helpful to make the effort. Then I want to talk about political eras. Aside from Washington/Adams,
there are four major ones, each dominated by a party, each with only two
exceptions as president:
- From 1800-1860, Jefferson through Buchanan, interrupted only by two Whig
generals (and their VPs, since both died in office, Harrison especially
hastily).
- From 1860-1932, Lincoln through Hoover, interrupted only by two two-term
Democrats (Cleveland and Wilson).
- From 1932-1980, Roosevelt through Carter, interrupted only by two two-term
Republicans (Eisenhower and Nixon/Ford).
- From 1980-2020, Reagan through Trump, interrupted only by two two-term
Democrats (Clinton and Obama).
There's quite a bit of interesting material I can draw from those periods.
Each starts with a legendary figure, and ends with a one-term disaster. (I
suppose you could say that about Washington/Adams as well, but that's a
rather short descent for an era.) In each, the exceptions substantially
resemble the dominant party. But the Reagan-to-Trump era does reflect an
anomaly: each of the first three eras started with a shift to a broader
and more egalitarian democracy, whereas Reagan was opposite. Each era had
a mid-period nudge in the same direction (Jackson/Van Buren, Roosevelt,
Kennedy/Johnson, but also GW Bush). Of course, the anti-democratic tilt
of Reagan-to-Trump needs some extra analysis, both to show how it could
run against the long arc of American history and why after 1988 it was
never able to post commanding majorities (as occurred in previous
eras).
I then posit that in 2020 the goal is not just to defeat Trump
but to win big enough to launch a new (and overdue) era. This will be
the big jump, but I think if Democrats aim big, they can win big --
and it will take nothing less to make the necessary changes. This is
possible because Republicans, both with and without Trump, have boxed
themselves into a corner where all of their beliefs and commitments
only serve to further hurt the vast majority of Americans. It will be
tough because Republicans still have a stranglehold on a large segment
of the public. But this spell can be broken if Democrats look beyond
the conciliatory tactics and marginal goals that marked the campaigns
of Obama and the Clintons. At some point this segues into a lesson on the need for unity
and tolerance of diversity within the Democratic Party. I'll probably
bring up Reagan's "11th commandment," which served Reagan well but
has since been lost on recent Tea Partiers and RINO-bashers (although
the post-election fawning over Trump suggests that Republicans will
come around to backing anything that wins for them). I'll probably wind up with a brief survey of issues, which
will stress flexibility and feedback within a broad set of principles.
I can imagine later doing a whole book on this, but this would just
offer a taste.
Book doesn't need to be more than 300 pages, and could be as short
as half that. It is important to get it out quickly to have any real
impact. I would consider working with a co-author, especially someone
who could carry on to do much of the promotion -- something I'm very
unlikely to be much good at.
While I can imagine that this could be worth doing, I can also think
of various reasons not to bother. The obvious one is that I haven't been
feeling well, having a good deal of back pain, and having a trouble with
my eyes -- things that have taken a toll from my normal workload over
the last few months. I also seem to be having more difficulties coming
up with satisfactory writing. I spent a lot of time yesterday trying
to write up a response to a particularly annoying Facebook rant, and
never did come up with anything I felt like sharing. I am especially
bothered by self-destructive arguments I see both on the left and the
right of the Democratic Party spectrum, and this sometimes tempts me
to throw up my hands and leave you all to your fates. On the other
hand, sometimes this tempts me to think that all the help you need
is a little clarity that I fancy I can provide.
Just knocked this much off the top of my head, in two sets of a
couple hours each, so this is very rough. Next step will be to try
to flesh out a bit more outline, maybe 3-5 times the length, with a
lot of bullet points. That would be the goal for the next 7-10 days.
If I manage that, I'll circulate it to a few friends, then make a
decision whether to proceed. The alternative project at this point
is probably a memoir, which is something that can take however much
time it takes (or however much I have left).
Comments welcome, and much appreciated.
Meanwhile, some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
Michelle Alexander:
Time to break the silence on Palestine: "Martin Luther King Jr.
courageously spoke out about the Vietnam War. We must do the same when
it comes to this grave injustice of our time." Yoni Applebaum:
Impeach Donald Trump: "Starting the process will rein in a president
who is undermining American ideals -- and bring the debate about his
fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs." Even after the
2016 election made impeachment possible in the House, I didn't have
any enthusiasm for this particular agenda. But I noticed this line:
"The question that determines whether an act is impeachable, though,
is whether it endangers American democracy." I'm not sure that really
defines the principle, but it sure describes Trump. Long piece, pretty
comprehensive. Jonathan Blitzer:
Frank Bruni:
BuzzFeed's controversial Cohen story raises question: Did Trump want to be
President? "His campaign was a marketing venture. That's why he didn't
want to put business on hold." Will Bunch:
The huge problem with Mueller's Trump-Russia probe that no one talks
about. Isaac Chotiner:
The disturbing, surprisingly complex relationship between white identity
politics and racism: interview with Ashley Jardina, author of White
Identity Politics
Jane Coaston:
Jason Ditz:
Ben Ehrenreich:
To those who think we can reform our way out of the climate crisis:
"Our only hope is to stop exploiting the earth -- and its people." Robert Fisk:
Bernie Sanders, Israel and the Middle East. David A Graham:
Trump's entire shutdown approach, encapsulated in one tweet. Charles Glass:
"Tell Me How This Ends" "America's muddled involvement with Syria. Umair Irfan:
How Trump's EPA is letting environmental criminals off the hook, in one
chart: "Referrals for criminal prosecutions for environmental crimes
are at a 30-year low." Rebecca Jennings:
The controversy around Trump's fast-food football feast, explained. Cameron Joseph:
Trump's companies boosted foreign worker visa use to 10-year high.Fred Kaplan:
Trump's Star Wars fantasy: "The president is proposing the most ambitious
and costly missile defense system since the Reagan era. It won't make us any
safer." I lobbed my wisecrack under Jason Ditz's piece, above. If you look
at this sanely, there are maybe 8-10 countries around the world that this
system might theoretically defend us from, and they are (with good reason)
more afraid of us than we are of them. Why can't we just negotiate a stand
down where we each give up the offensive capability this prays to shoot
down? That would be much safer and much less expensive, especially for the
US (the only nation rich and deranged enough to try to deploy a complete
defensive system, as well as the only nation with a trillion dollar plan
to rebuild its entire nuclear arsenal; other nations wouldn't have to do
more than countermeasures, such as the "dumptruck full of gravel" that
Chalmers Johnson wrote about -- enough to destroy every satellite around
the earth). Of course, it's possible that space-based anti-missile systems
never were a serious technical idea. Back when Reagan first unveiled his
"Star Wars" fantasy, Doonesbury suggested that its SDI acronym really
meant SFI: Strategic Funding Initiative: i.e., a scam for contractors
to soak up billions of dollars.
Trump and Putin's cone of seclusion: On the lack of notes on meetings
between Trump and Putin. Title sounds like a flashback reference to Don
Adams' TV spy comedy, Get Smart's
cone of silence. Dara Lind:
PR Lockhart:
Supporters of Confederate monuments had a very bad week: "The battle
over Confederate monuments is still raging -- and states are losing.". German Lopez:
There are no "feel-good" government shutdown stories: "The government
shutdown is causing a lot of people to suffer. There's nothing good about
it.". Pankaj Mishra:
The malign incompetence of the British ruling class: "With Brexit, the
chumocrats who drew borders from India to Ireland are getting a taste of
their own medicine." Andrew Prokop:
The weekend's Trump-Russia news, explained: Big story here is
Adam Goldman/Michael S Schmidt/Nicholas Fandos: FBI opened inquiry
whether Trump was secretly working on behalf of Russia, but the
timing says more about the FBI's defense instincts in response to
the Comey firing than anything Trump had done. JM Rieger:
Trump used to brag about the click-in online polls his former fixer
tried to rig. David Roberts:
Here's one fight the Green New Deal should avoid for now: "The smart
political move is leaving the question of what counts as clean energy as
open as possible." Jennifer Rubin:
Aaron Rupar:
Amanda Sakuma:
Dylan Scott:
Trump is looking for a new way to cut Medicaid -- without Congress.
Congress has 7 big ideas to cut drug prices. Here's how they work.
Any/all would help (and I can think of a few more), but my preferred
solution is: "7. Rip up our patent system and start from scratch."
Actually, I'd be willing to phase the patent system out, first by
incrementally reducing the 17-year term down to zero, in the meantime
replacing the monopoly grant with arbitrated licensing fees. As this
phases in, you shift research and development costs to "open source"
public development, which in the long run will be more effective. I'd
also try to internationalize this system, inviting other countries to
share in, and add to, the cost savings and development bounty. The
article talks about prizes as incentive for private development. I
think there is a place for that, but it shares with patents the
problem of being a high-risk, high-reward startegy, and tends to
reinforce secrecy. I'd rather see more development subsidized up
front, so there is very little risk, with prizes more as a way of
recognition and reputation-building.
House Democrats are frustrated the shutdown is drowning out the rest
of their agenda. Emily Stewart:
Matt Taibbi:
Jeffrey Toobin:
William Barr and the crucial role of the Justice Department. Janie Velencia:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to raise taxes on the rich -- and Americans
agree. Alex Ward:
- Robert Wright:
How Trump could wind up making globalism great again: I found this
after I wrote the introduction above, but this confirms my basic insight
into Trump's "art of the deal":
A few days before the 2016 election, journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote
this about Donald Trump: "He has no concept of a nonzero-sum engagement,
in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is
intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he
is psychically at peace." . . .
Still, in Trump's hierarchy of bliss, dominance does seem to rank at
the top. "I love to crush the other side and take the benefits," he wrote
in a book called Think Big. "Why? Because there is nothing greater.
For me it is even better than sex, and I love sex." He went on to observe:
"You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win.
That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win -- not the other side.
You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself."
. . .
Now we've got a president who not only resists playing nonzero-sum
games but actively fans emotions that impede the wise playing of them.
And as if that weren't enough, the fanning of those emotions can
recalibrate the games, making lose-lose outcomes even worse than they
would be otherwise. . . . Trump's policy instincts make good governance
hard, and his political style makes the consequences of bad governance
grave.
Most of the piece goes into Trump's trade deal strategy, which is a
lot like his strategy everywhere else: to demolish his opponent no
matter how much it winds up hurting himself. Then there is this:
Alternative histories are speculative. But the general principle makes
sense: If your policies [Bush in Iraq, Obama in Syria and Libya] bring
instability that in turn breeds fear and hatred, then candidates who
thrive on those things are more likely to get elected. So if there's a
chunk of international law designed to prevent instability -- such as
the UN charter's constraints on transborder aggression -- maybe you
should pay some attention to it, especially if you're going to go around
singing the praises of the rules-based international order [he quoted
Iraq War supporter George Packer, chastising Trump for this]. Yet many
American politicians who sing those praises also championed the Iraq
and Libya adventures.
That those people include Hillary Clinton -- the only alternative to
Trump in the 2016 election -- tells you how far the American political
system is from taking global governance seriously. On the one hand, we
had a candidate who ostensibly supported the UN charter but casually
disregarded it. On the other, we had Trump, who denounced various US
military adventures but disdains the international law that stands in
opposition to military adventurism.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, January 13, 2019
Weekend Roundup
For many years now, I've identified two major political problems
in America. The most obvious one is the nation's habit and obsession
with projection of military power as its leverage in dealing with
other nations. As US economic power has waned, and as America shed
its liberal ideals, it's become easier for others to challenge its
supremacy. In turn, American power has hardened around its military
and covert networks, placing the nation on a permanent war footing.
This near-constant state of war, since 1945 but even more blatantly
since 2001, has led to numerous social maladies, like domestic gun
violence and the xenophobia leading to the current "border crisis."
The other big problem is increasing inequality. The statistics,
which started in the 1970s but really took off in the "greed is good"
1980s, are clear and boring, but the consequences are numerous, both
subtle and pernicious. It would take a long book to map out most of
the ways the selfish pursuit and accumulation of riches has warped
business, politics, and society. One small example is that when GW
Bush arbitrarily commanded the world to follow his War on Terror lead
("you're either with us or against us"), he was assuming that as US
President he was entitled to the same arbitrary powers (and lack of
accountability) corporate CEOs enjoyed.
I used to wonder how Reagan was able to affect such a huge change
in America despite relatively sparse legislative accomplishments --
mostly his big tax cut. The answer is that as president he could send
signals to corporate and financial leaders that government would not
interfere with their more aggressive pursuit of power and profit.
Reagan's signals have been reiterated by every Republican president
since, with ever less concern for scruples or ethics or even the
slightest concern for consequences. All Trump has done has been to
carry this logic to its absurdist extreme: his greed is shameless,
even when it crosses into criminality.
Still, what the government lockout, now entering its fourth week,
shows, is that we may need to formulate a third mega-ailment: we seem
to have lost our commitment to basic competency. We should have seen
this coming when politicians (mostly Republicans) decided that politics
trumps all other considerations, so they could dispute (or ignore) any
science or expertise or so-called facts they found inconvenient. (Is
it ironical that the same people who decry "political correctness"
when it impinges on their use of offensive rhetoric are so committed
to imposing their political regimen on all discussions of what we
once thought of as reality?)
A couple things about competency. One is that it's rarely noticed,
except in the breech. You expect competency, even when you're engaging
with someone whose qualifications you can properly judge -- a doctor,
say, or a computer technician, or a mechanic. You also expect a degree
of professional ethical standards. Trust depends on those things, and
no matter how many time you're reminded caveat emptor, virtually
everything you do in everyday life is built on trust. We can all point
to examples of people who violated your trust, but until recently such
people were in the minority. Now we have Donald Trump. And sure, lots
of us distrusted him from the start of his campaign. He was, after all,
vainglorious, corrupt, a habitual liar, totally lacking in empathy, his
head full of mean-spirited rubbish.
On the other hand, even I am shocked at how incapable Trump has been
at understanding the most basic rudiments of his job. There's nothing
particularly wrong with him having policy views, or even an agenda, but
the most basic requirement of his job is that he keep the government
working, according to the constitution and the laws as established per
that constitution -- you know, the one he had to swear to protect and
follow when he took his oath of office. There have been shutdowns in
the past -- basically ever since Newt Gingrich decided the threat would
be a clever way to extort some policy concessions from Bill Clinton --
but this is the first one that was imposed by a president.
His reason? Well, obviously he's made a political calculation, where
he thinks he can either bully the Democrats into giving him something
they really hate ($5.7 billion so he can brag about how he's delivering
that "big, beautiful wall" he campaigned on) and thereby restore his
"art of the deal" mojo from the tarnish of losing the 2018 "midterms"
so badly, or rouse the American people (his base, anyway) into blaming
the Democrats for all the damage the shutdown causes. Either way, he
feels that his second-term election in 2020 depends on this defense of
political principle. Besides, he hates the federal government anyway --
possibly excepting the military and a few other groups currently exempt
from the shutdown -- mostly because he's bought into the credo that
"politics is everything, and everything is politics" (which makes most
of the Democrat-leaning government enemy territory).
On the other hand, all he's really shown is that he's unfit to hold
office, because he's forgotten that his main job is to keep the United
States government working: implementing and enforcing the laws of the
land, per the constitution. One might argue that using his office for
such a political ploy is as significant a violation of his trust as
anything else he's done. Indeed, one might argue that it is something
he should be impeached for (although that would require a political
consensus that has yet to form -- not that he isn't losing popularity
during this charade).
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias:
Trump's Hannity interview reveals a president out of touch with
reality:
But this is the crux of the matter. He doesn't consider this issue very
important. It's not important enough for him to offer Democrats anything
of substance in a legislative swap, and it's not important enough for him
to have bothered to learn anything about the issue or even develop a
specific proposal. He is imposing huge costs on a huge number of people,
but he personally is suffering nothing more than the indignity of hanging
out in the White House.
And he's so unselfconscious that he actually threw himself a pity party
in the midst of all the problems he's causing. There's no apology here for
the inconvenience, followed by an explanation of why he's doing it. Because
he's not sorry. He wants us to feel sorry for him. And that, in some ways,
is the most disturbing thing of all.
Yglesias focuses on the workers who aren't getting paid, but there
are much larger potential costs to many more people if you can factor
in the work that doesn't get done, and the signals not doing this work.
Much of what the government does is meant to keep companies honest and
trustworthy. Losing that doesn't seem to bother Trump, and indeed most
people may not notice the loss -- until it's too late.
FBI agents' union slams Trump, says the shutdown is harming national
security.
The more Trump talks, the less likely it is he'll get his precious steel
slats: "To get things done, the president needs to shut up." That
Trump keeps trying to make political hay out of the lockout suggests
he's only concerned with the political optics. (On the other hand, if
it isn't talked about on Fox & Friends, is it even real to
him?).
Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020: "Americans want outsiders,
reformers, and fresh faces, not politicians with decades of baggage."
In particular, "Why nominate another Iraq hawk?" With Clinton on the
shelf, it's hard to think of any Democrat with more easily attacked
baggage than Biden. (John Kerry has similar problems -- some exactly
the same. And sure, Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emmanuel were on track to
catch up, but they're already pretty thoroughly discredited.) Biden
is a guy that some in the media enjoy touting and that most Democrats
would settle for, but no one really likes him. (You do know that
Leslie Knope's "hots" for him was a joke, don't you?)
It's not just that Biden, despite his currently strong polling, would
make for a weak candidate if he runs. The entire spectacle of once again
re-fighting every intraparty battle from the past two generations of
Democratic Party politics would be bad for almost everyone at a time
when Democrats should be talking about their ideas for the future rather
than raking over the past.
The real crisis is that Trump has no idea what he's doing.
The shutdown is intractable because Trump's wall is ridiculous and
Republicans know it: "Conservatives won't trade the wall for anything
good because they know it's a bad idea.".
Taxing the rich is very popular; it's Republicans who have the radical
position: "But TV news anchors are rich."
Networks giving Trump free airtime on Tuesday refused to air Obama's 2014
immigration speech.
The "skills gap" was a lie: "New research shows it was the consequence
of high unemployment rather than its cause." Nothing on who knew better at
the time, although I suspect that when I start looking around, Dean Baker
and Paul Krugman will have something to say on that. Peter Baker:
Trump confronts the prospect of a 'nonstop political war' for
survival. Russell Berman:
The impact of the government shutdown is about to snowball. John Cassidy:
Coral Davenport:
Shutdown means EPA pollution inspectors aren't on the job. Tom Engelhardt:
Living on a quagmire planet: "Honestly, this could get a lot
uglier." Trip Gabriel:
Before Trump, Steve King set the agenda for the wall and anti-immigration
politics. Masha Gessen:
Searching for a substantive response to Trump's hateful speech:
"Shutting down the government over the border wall is to policy what
writing a pouty letter to Kim Jong Un is to diplomacy, and the leader
of the Senate opposition should have no part in elevating it." Then
Gessen finds the response she's looking for, from Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez:
The one thing that the President has not talked about is the fact that
he has systematically engaged in the violation of international human
rights on our border. He has separated children from their families.
He talked about what happened the day after Christmas -- on the day of
Christmas, a child died in [Customs and Border Protection] custody.
The President should not be asking for more money to an agency that
has systematically violated human rights; the President should be
really defending why we are funding such an agency at all. Because
right now what we are seeing is death, right now what we are seeing
is the violation of human rights, these children and these families
are being held in what are called hieleras, which are basically
freezing boxes that no person should be maintained in for any amount
of time. . . . He is trying to restrict every form of legal immigration
there is in the United States. He is fighting against family reunification,
he's fighting against the diversity visa lottery. . . . This is systematic,
it is wrong, and it is anti-American.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Unthinkable: 50 moments that define an improbable presidency: I'll
just list them, and you can go to the page for links and details:
- Donald Trump touches the magic orb
- A cabinet officer likes private planes too much
- The president praises the congressman who body-slammed a reporter
- An overcompensating press secretary lies about crowd size
- Trump tells the Boy Scouts about a hot New York party
- A name-calling feud ends with the secretary of state's ouster by tweet
- The WikiLeaks president goes silent
- The nation loses its consoler in chief
- The first president to complain about an election he won
- Trump waits 19 months to pick his science adviser
- The president's most trusted adviser is his own gut
- A White House economist creates facts for the president
- Trump holds a top secret confab on the Mar-a-Lago dining terrace
- The president just wants to go home
- Trump threatens to strip security clearances from his critics
- Mueller's "witch hunt" is good at finding witches
- Trump leads the country to the longest government shutdown in American history
- The chief justice of the United States corrects the president
- Trump disseminates Soviet propaganda
- The White House punishes a CNN reporter for asking questions
- The buck stops over there
- The president tries to kick transgender service members out of the military
- Trump tweets the wisdom of Mussolini
- Turkish agents assault protesters near the White House
- Trump helps the Saudis cover up a murder
- "We're gonna have the cleanest air"
- The president can't stop talking about carnage
- America gets a first daughter
- The UN General Assembly laughs at the president
- Rain stops Trump from honoring the dead
- The president learns about separation of powers
- The president learns about the Justice Department
- The president lies constantly
- Trump threatens to press his "nuclear button"
- Public humiliation comes for everyone in the White House
- The CIA dead become a TV prop
- You know you're in a constitutional crisis when . . .
- Trump mocks Christine Blasey Ford to a cheering crowd
- A new term enters the presidential lexicon: "shithole countries"
- Trump throws paper towels at Puerto Ricans
- "I have the absolute right to pardon myself"
- Covfefe
- The president calls his porn-star ex-paramour "horseface"
- Trump picks the wrong countries for his travel ban
- Trump declares war on black athletes
- James Comey is fired
- Putin and Trump talk without chaperones
- The president still hasn't released his tax returns
- "Very fine people on both sides"
- Children are taken from their parents and incarcerated
Saddest thing about this list? I didn't have to look any of them up.
Second saddest thing? The umbrella didn't even make the cut. Rebecca Gordon:
Confronting "Alternative Facts": "A Twenty-First-Century Incredibility
Chasm: Life in the United States of Trump." Greg Grandin:
Bricks in the Wall: A history of US efforts to fortify the border
with Mexico, starting in 1945 with a 10-foot high chain link fence that
stretched 5 miles near Calexico, CA, built with materials that had been
used in Japanese-American internment camps. Grandin has a new book on
the subject: The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border
Wall in the Mind of America. Glenn Greenwald:
As Democratic elites reunite with neocons, the party's voters are becoming
far more militaristic and pro-war than Republicans: I can't help but
think Greenwald has cherry-picked a few facts here and turned them into a
gross slander of the Democratic Party base.
Jack Healy/Tyler Pager:
Farm country stood by Trump. But the shutdown is pushing it to the breaking
point. Sean Illing:
Why so many people who need the government hate it: "Everyone benefits
from welfare. Here's why most people don't know that." Interview with
Suzanne Mettler, author of The Government-Citizen Disconnect.
Pull quotes:
"If individual citizens withdraw from public life, the only people in society
who have power are those with lots of economic power."
"We have to find a way to recapture that sense of the government as an
instrument of good in our lives, and we have to stop thinking of it as the
enemy."
"If we become more and more anti-government, we're against ourselves.
We're against our own collective capacity to do anything."
Trump's ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades: Interview with
Craig Unger, author of House of Trump, House of Putin. Paul Krugman:
Trump's big libertarian experiment: "Does contaminated food smell
like freedom?
"Government," declared Ronald Reagan in his first Inaugural Address, "is
not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Republicans
have echoed his rhetoric ever since. Somehow, though, they've never
followed through on the radical downsizing of government their ideology
calls for.
But now Donald Trump is, in effect, implementing at least part of the
drastic reduction in government's role his party has long claimed to favor.
If the shutdown drags on for months -- which seems quite possible -- we'll
get a chance to see what America looks like without a number of public
programs the right has long insisted we don't need. Never mind the wall;
think of what's going on as a big, beautiful libertarian experiment.
Seriously, it's striking how many of the payments the federal government
is or soon will be failing to make are for things libertarians insist we
shouldn't have been spending taxpayer dollars on anyway.
Melting snowballs and the winter of debt.
Elizabeth Warren and her party of ideas: The tide has turned:
Today's G.O.P. is a party of closed minds, hostile to expertise,
aggressively uninterested in evidence, whose idea of a policy argument
involves loudly repeating the same old debunked doctrines. Paul Ryan's
"innovative" proposals of 2011 (cut taxes and privatize Medicare) were
almost indistinguishable from those of Newt Gingrich in 1995.
Meanwhile, Democrats have experienced an intellectual renaissance.
They have emerged from their 1990s cringe; they're no longer afraid to
challenge conservative pieties; and there's a lot of serious, well-informed
intraparty debate about issues from health care to climate change.
Eric Lach:
The corrupting falsehoods of Trump's Oval Office speech. Dara Lind:
Trump's advisers push for emergency declaration -- while assuming it'll be
stopped in court. German Lopez:
Democrats need to think way bigger on guns: Doubts about focusing
on background checks. Dylan Matthews:
All 20 previous government shutdowns, explained. In my introduction,
I blamed the phenomenon on Newt Gingrich, but most of these were prior
to 1985 (mostly when Reagan was president). This doesn't go into further
threats made by Gingrich and later Republican threats aimed at Obama,
although it does include the 2013 shutdown. Related:
Javier Zarrancina/Li Zhou: The astonishing effects of the shutdown, in
8 charts. John McWhorter:
Trump's typos reveal his lack of fitness for the presidency. Greg Miller:
Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin
from senior officials in administration. Kendra Pierre-Louis:
Ocean warming is accelerating faster than thought, new research
finds:
As the planet has warmed, the oceans have provided a critical buffer.
They have slowed the effects of climate change by absorbing 93 percent
of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases humans pump into the
atmosphere.
"If the ocean wasn't absorbing as much heat, the surface of the land
would heat up much faster than it is right now," said Malin L. Pinsky,
an associate professor in the department of ecology, evolution and natural
resources at Rutgers University. "In fact, the ocean is saving us from
massive warming right now."
But the surging water temperatures are already killing off marine
ecosystems, raising sea levels and making hurricanes more destructive.
Brad Plumer:
US carbon emissions surged in 2018 even as coal plants closed. Andrew Prokop:
Aaron Rupar:
Amanda Sakuma:
Eric Schmidt/Mark Landler:
Pentagon officials fear Bolton's actions increase risk of clash with
Iran. Adam Serwer:
Trump the toddler: "The president is pursuing a child's strategy for
getting what he wants." Aditi Shrikant:
National parks are getting trashed amid the government shutdown.
This strikes me as one of the most telling stories of the lockout.
I've spent a lot of time working late in offices, and as such I've
noticed people coming in to clean them up every night. It turns out
that it takes a lot of work to keep any place inhabited by humans
from turning into a dump, but most office workers, clocking in and
out on expected schedules, never see that. Emily Stewart:
Dominic Tierney:
The US isn't really leaving Syria and Afghanistan: Author sees
mostly technical problems, largely because the US military is much
better at building bases than dismantling them -- especially when
it wants to do one and not the other. There's also the problem of
not having a coherent plan let alone viable allies. And up and down
the command chain there are people who can't be trusted not to fake
a crisis or provocation if it serves their agenda. Whenever you give
someone like John Bolton the opportunity to explain what Trump means,
it's likely to spin around 180 degrees. Alex Ward:
The government shutdown is hurting America's diplomats -- and
diplomacy. Benjamin Wittes:
Robin Wright:
Pompeo and his Bible define US policy in the Middle East:
Pompeo's speech had three dimensions: it was anti-Obama, anti-Iran, and
in favor of so-called traditional allies, as Robert Malley, the president
of the International Crisis Group and a senior National Security Council
staffer in the Obama Administration, told me. "The first reflects a
politicization of foreign policy for which it is hard to conjure up a
precedent. The second an ideological obsession that does not comport with
reality. And the third an implicit celebration of an autocratic status quo
that masquerades as a tribute to stability. Pompeo's self-proclaimed message
was that America is a force for good. Whether that ever was the case, his
speech was proof that, today at least, it plainly is not."
For more on Pompeo's speech/mission:
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Weekend Roundup
Another pretty awful week, followed by a few hours grabbing a few
links in case I ever want to look back and see what was happening,
other than my own misery.
One point I've been wanting to make is that over quite some number
of presidential administrations, I've noticed a pattern. At first,
presidents are overwhelmed and wary of screwing up, so they tend to
defer to their staff, in many ways becoming prisoners of whoever
they happened to install -- usually the choice of their staff plus
the party's unelected Washington insiders. However, presidential
staff are usually careful to flatter their boss, faking fealty, and
over time all that deference (even if insincere) bolsters the ego
of whoever's president. Meanwhile the president gets comfortable,
even a bit cocky about his accomplishments, so starts to impose his
opinions and instincts. There are often further stages, and two-term
presidents tend to go to seed six years in (Eisenhower and Reagan
are obvious examples; Nixon didn't get that far; Clinton, Bush II,
and Obama were sidelines with enemy-controlled Congresses). But
we've clearly made the transition from Trump being the front man
to actually being in charge, running an administration and party
that is increasingly deferential to his every whim. And while most
of us thought Trump was pretty nuts to start with, he used to stay
comfortably within the Republican Party playbook. But increasingly,
his chaos and madness are becoming uniquely his own. Sure, he still
has to walk back an occasional notion, like his decision to withdraw
ground troops from Syria. He may even find he has to give up on his
budget extortion ploy (aka, the shutdown).
Lots of bad things are likely to come from this, but one can hope
that two recent trends will only take firmer and broader root. The
first is the understanding that what's wrong with Trump and what's
wrong with the Republican Party are the same things, all the way
down to their shared contempt for democracy and the people. The
second, an outgrowth of the first, is that the Democratic Party is
changing rapidly from a party that opportunistically tries to pass
itself off as a "kinder, gentler version" of conservative/neoliberal
orthodoxy to one that is serious about solving the real problems of
war and powerlessness and inequality that have hurt the vast majority
of American voters so grievously since Reagan.
I didn't write much about these themes below, but there's plenty
of evidence to back them up.
Some scattered links this week:
Trevor Aaronson/Ali Younes:
US ramps up bombing of ISIS in Eastern Syria following Trump withdrawal
announcement. Bruce Ackerman:
No, Trump cannot declare an 'Emergency' to build his wall. Rachel M Cohen:
Could expanding employee ownership be the next big economic policy? David Dayen:
David Frum:
The great illusion of The Apprentice: "Even more than wealth,
the reality-TV show promised its viewers accountability." Masha Gessen:
What does Donald Trump think about when he thinks about "wall"? Elizabeth Goitein:
What the President could do if he declares a State of Emergency. Tara Golshan:
Republican Sen. Pat Roberts expected to announce retirement, giving Democrats
hope of a blue Kansas. Actually, the Democrats would enjoy better odds
running against Roberts, who (much to their surprise) nearly lost in 2014,
than against a generic (but much younger and very likely more right-wing)
Republican. Greg Grandin/Elizabeth Oglesby:
Washington traind Guatemala's mass murderers -- the the Border Patrol played
a role. Ryan Grim/Glenn Greenwald:
US Senate's first bill, in midst of shutdown, is a bipartisan defense of
the Israeli government from boycotts. Mehdi Hasan:
Hassan Hassan:
Moscow's little-noticed Islamic-outreach effort: "Russia is promoting
Islamic moderation in unison with Arab powers -- and further cementing its
position in the Middle East." Nathan Heller:
The philosopher redefining equality: "Elizabeth Anderson thinks we've
misunderstood the basis of a free and fair society." Jack Hitt:
The real story behind the Havana Embassy mystery. Daniel Immerwahr:
The Lethal Crescent: Where the Cold War was hot. Book review of
Paul Thomas Chamberlin: The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking
the Long Peace. Umair Irfan:
A brief guide to David Bernhardt, Ryan Zinke's replacement at the Interior
Department. Robert D Kaplan:
Time to get out of Afghanistan: "The United States is spending beyond
its means on a mission that might only be helping its strategic rivals."
Kaplan has been a hawk on Afghanistan at least since his 1990 celebration
of the CIA-sponsored Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan,
and even before 9/11 he's frequently hired on as a paid consultant to the
US military, while writing propaganda like Imperial Grunts: The American
Military on the Ground. So fair to say, if he's throwing in the towel,
the "mission" is totally fucked. Jen Kirby:
What you need to know about Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's new far-right
president. David Klion:
The Blob: Ben Rhodes and the crisis of liberal foreign policy. Book
review of Rhodes: The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White
House. Mike Konczal:
The Green New Deal is good for the planet -- and the Democratic
Party. Paul Krugman:
Akela Lacy:
Rep. Ro Khanna on Afghanistan: "Trump's instincts to withdraw are correct,
but the tactical implementation matters". Lawrence Lessig:
Trump's border wall demand is constitutionally illegitimate. Dara Lind:
Mujib Mashal:
CIA's Afghan Forces leave a trail of abuse and anger: "The fighters
hold the line in the war's toughest spots, but officials say their brutal
tactics are terrorizing the public and undermining the US mission."
Rather telling, at this late date, that the author still thinks there
is a "US mission" in Afghanistan. Also that Afghan Forces' tactics are
any more brutal than what the US has been doing there for the last 18
(or is it 41?) years. Ella Nilsen:
House Democrats officially unveil their first bill in the majority: a
sweeping anti-corruption proposal: "Democrats will take up voting
rights, campaign finance reform, and a lobbying crackdown -- all in
their first bill of the year." Gail Pellett:
An alternative reflection for 2018 -- thank you note to writers who
nurtured my mind and soul. Andrew Prokop:
Alissa Quart:
Middle-class shame will decide where America is headed: "Who can appeal
to the people who feel the cost like they've gotten a raw deal?" Robert Reich:
In Trump's mind, all deals are private. 'Public interest' means nothing
to him: "At least a scoundrel knows when he is doing wrong. But the
president is blind to the very idea of public interest." David Roberts:
The Green New Deal, explained: "An insurgent movement is pushing Democrats
to back an ambitious climate change solution." Aaron Rupar:
Trump's bizarre Rose Garden news conference shows why he's impossible to
negotiate with: "Unhinged, incoherent, oblivious, and dangerous.". Amanda Sakuma:
Stephanie Savell:
This map shows where in the world the US military is combatting
terrorism -- where "terrorism" is basically anything that
challenges American political and economic power. Tom Scocca:
It's good to talk about impeaching the motherfucker. Adam Serwer:
Emily Stewart:
Why Trump taking credit for low gas prices is a bad idea. Matt Taibbi:
In 2019, let's finally retire 'electability'. Margaret Talbot:
The House Democrats' best path forward: "To counter Donald Trump, and
to prepare for 2020, the Party needs to think big." Ben Taub:
Iraq's post-ISIS campaign of revenge: "The corruption and cruelty of
the state's response to suspected jihadis and their families seem likely
to lead to the resurgence of the terror group." Steven K Vogel:
Elizabeth Warren wants to stop inequality before it starts: "Redistribution
is important, but it comes too late." On the other hand, we're not talking
about a future threat. It's already too late. Jon Wiener:
2019 will be the worst year of Donald Trump's life. Ian Wilkie:
Now Mattis admits there was no evidence Assad used poison gas on his
people. Matthew Yglesias:
Li Zhou:
Trump just warned the shutdown could last for years. That's pretty
unlikely.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Weekend Roundup
No Weekend Roundup last week, and I didn't have any intention of doing
one this week either. But when I sat down at the computer today, I figured
I'd copy a few links (without comments) into the notebook for future
reference. Wound up with quite a few. I started with Matthew Yglesias,
then decided to stick to the format I used there: boldfacing the author,
linking the article. Normally I would group related articles, such as
on the shutdown/wall, or the Syria withdrawal, but only in a couple
instances did I do that -- mostly when an article by a unique writer
adds or counters one I already had pegged. I wound up with a couple
very brief comments, noted interviews, and added tag quotes or subheds
under long articles, where the title didn't explain enough.
Still awful sore, but this was probably the first day in ten where
I've been able to sit at the computer for more than an hour without
really paying for it. Managed to listen to some music along the way,
so Music Week tomorrow won't be a total wash.
Some scattered links this week:
Spencer Ackerman/Adam Rawnsley:
$800 million in taxpayer money went to private prisons where migrants work
for pennies. Andrew J Bacevich:
Dean Baker:
Warren-Schakowsky Bill is a huge step toward bringing drug costs
down. Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman:
For Trump, 'a war every day,' waged increasingly alone: "At the midpoint
of his term, the president has grown more sure of his own judgment and more
isolated from anyone else's than at any point since he took office." Doug Bandow:
Why Trump is right to withdraw troops. Zack Beauchamp:
The 9 thinkers who made sense of 2018's chaos: 1 and 2) Steven Levitsky
and Daniel Ziblatt on the big picture of the Trump presidency [authors of
How Democracies Die]; Kimberlé Crenshaw on the battle over "identity
politics" and "intersectionality" [author of On Intersectionality];
4) Kate Manne on the Brett Kavanaugh fight [author of Down Girl];
5 to 7) John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck on the midterm elections
[authors of Identity Crisis]; 8) Carol Anderson on the war on voting
rights [author of One Person, No Vote]; 9) Zeynap Tufekci on the
baleful influence of social media [author of Twitter and Tear Gas].
I haven't read any of these, and am rather skeptical of most of them. Peter Beinart:
What the Yemen vote reveals about the Democratic Party. Julia Belluz:
A new Trump rule could take food stamps away from 755,000 people. Christina Cauterucci:
Claire McCaskill's bitter farewell. Juan Cole:
Steve Eder:
Did a Queens podiatrist help Donald Trump avoid Vietnam? Conor Friedersdorf:
Susan B Glasser:
How Trump made war on Angela Merkel and Europe. Justin Glawe:
Immigrant deaths in private prisons explode under Trump. Tara Golshan:
Trump's approval rating drops to Charlottesville levels during
shutdown. Sarah Greenberger:
I worked in the Interior Department. Watching Zinke's tenure was
heartbreaking. Sean Illing:
Umair Irfan:
Dahr Jamail:
Ten ways 2018 brought us closer to climate apocalypse. Patrick Radden Keefe:
How Mark Burnett resurrected Donald Trump as an icon of American
success. Jen Kirby:
Michael Klare:
The Coming of Hyperwar. Paul Krugman:
Jill Lepore:
What 2018 looked like fifty years ago. Eric Levitz:
Eric Levitz: Trump: Give me a wall or I'll engineer a recession. Dara Lind:
Slats, fences, and wall, explained: what exactly the shutdown fight is
about. Adam Liptak:
Roberts, leader of Supreme Court's conservative majority, fights perception
that it is partisan. On the other hand:
Nelson W Cunningham: A holiday mystery: Why did John Roberts intervene in
the Mueller probe? Eric Lipton/Steve Eder/John Branch:
'This is our reality now.' On Trump and the environment: Dismissing
science; Easing a 'war on coal'; Sidestepping protections; Profiting, at
a cost German Lopez:
Bill McKibben:
At last, divestment is hitting the fossil fuel industry where it
hurts. John Nichols:
The Trouble With Patrick Shanahan. Caitlin Oprysko:
Trump sounds 'more like a mob boss than president' with Cohen
attacks. Martin Pengelly:
Matt Peterson:
The making of a trade warrior: on Robert Lighthizer. Related:
Annie Lowrey: The 'madman' behind Trump's trade theory: on Peter
Navarro. Rob Picheta:
Journalists faced 'unprecedented' hostility this year, report says.
Related:
United States added to list of most dangerous countries for journalists
for first time. Gareth Porter:
Trump scores, breaks generals' 50-year war record. Andrew Prokop:
Linda Qiu:
Sudarsan Raghavan:
An unnatural disaster: "Yemen's hunger crisis is born of deliberate
policies, pursued primarily by a Saudi-led coalition backed by the United
States." Frank Rich:
GOP leaders won't tolerate Trump's chaos for much longer. Who's he
kidding? The only other person who still harbors such fantasies is:
Thomas L Friedman: Time for GOP to threaten to fire Trump. David Roberts:
Amanda Sakuma:
Dylan Scott:
Scott Shane/Sheera Frenkel:
Russian 2016 influence operation targeted African-Americans on social
media. Richard Silverstein:
Netanyahu government falls. Danny Sjursen:
Ringing in a new year of war. Emily Stewart:
What the Republican tax bill did -- and didn't -- do, one year later:
"The GOP tax cuts didn't pay for themselves. They did, however, deliver
a lot of stock buybacks." Andrew Sullivan:
The establishment will never say no to a war. Nick Tabor:
The Trump Administration's war on wildlife should be a scandal. Hiroko Tabuchi:
The oil industry's covert campaign to rewrite American car emissions
rules. Matt Taibbi:
Alexia Underwood:
Trump's secret trip to Iraq didn't quite go as planned. Siva Vaidhyanathan:
Facebook workers are the only ones who can hold Facebook
accountable. Peter Wade:
John Kelly confirms he was lying all along: The White House is in
chaos. Philip Weiss:
Sheldon Adelson was a giant loser in midterms -- and Trump is letting
him know it. Matthew Yglesias:
Li Zhou:
Trump as gotten 66 judges confirmed this year. In his second year, Obama
had gotten 49. Two pieces on the late Amos Oz:
Haidar Eid: Amos Oz was no dove; and
Marc H Ellis: Amos Oz and the end of liberal Zionism.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, December 16, 2018
Weekend Roundup
Some scattered links this (or the previous) week:
The latest Obamacare ruling is part of a larger conservative attack on
democracy: A federal judge in Texas ruled Friday that the whole of
ACA is unconstitutional, despite a previous ruling by the Supreme Court
that it is constitutional, despite the failure of the Senate to repeal
or significantly rewrite it during the 2017-18 Congress, despite the
elections in 2018 that overturned Republican control of the House and
various states, including Wisconsin -- where this particular case
originated. It's a good example of why Republicans obsess so much
over appointing their political hacks to the courts.
Friday night he [Wisconsin Solicit General Misha Tseytlin] scored his
triumph -- his kooky legal theory is the law of the land, according to
at least one federal judge.
Other judges may disagree and as best I can tell experts in the legal
community are deeply skeptical that this challenge will ultimately prevail,
arguing that it reflects a fringy legal perspective. I'm not a lawyer
myself and more importantly I'm not a psychic so I don't know what John
Roberts wants to do with this issue.
But what strikes me about the case is how utterly mainstream Tseytlin's
theory became in GOP circles very quickly, and how brazenly undemocratic
Republicans have been in pursuit of their goal of depriving people of their
health insurance. . . .
The striking thing about all of this, however, is that it's not just one
oddball judge in Texas -- it's twenty Republican attorneys general. And
it's not just one GOP elected official misleading voters about their stance
on preexisting conditions, it's dozens. And it's not just one embittered
losing gubernatorial candidate pulling an undemocratic fast one during the
lame duck session -- it's the near-unanimous decision of two different state
legislative caucuses. This is, evidently, how the overlapping networks of
donors, operatives, activists, and elected officials who comprise the GOP
think the country should be run.
You've probably heard that Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan have
scrambled to pass lame-duck legislation to strip powers from incoming
Democratic governors (much as North Carolina Republicans did after losing
the governorship there in 2016). One of those laws prevents the new
Governor and Attorney General from withdrawing from lawsuits like this
one. After decades of increasingly unscrupulous effort to manipulate
the public and manoeuver behind the scenes, Republicans have lost all
respect for democracy. More links on this:
Other Yglesias links:
Top House Democrats join Elizabeth Warren's push to fundamentally change
American capitalism: Support is growing for Warren's Accountable
Capitalism Act, which introduces the idea of "codetermination" to the
structure of US corporations. The idea is practiced in Europe, mostly
in Germany. When you give workers seats on corporate boards, companies
behave better, and not just to their workers but to customers and to
the general public. Germany, for instance, has retained most of its
manufacturing base while maintaining favorable trade balances -- the
exact opposite of what US companies have done under the prevailing
doctrine of doing nothing but increasing shareholder profits. This
sort of reform seemed inconceivable in America before 2010, when
Thomas Geoghegan's book, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life, came out. No
one mentions this book, but the growing interest in socialism has
something to do with awareness of successful European models.
Warren's corporate accountability initiatives would have huge economic
implications but zero budgetary cost. At a time of low levels of public
trust in institutions, these proposals don't ask anyone to have faith
that government officials are going to make good use of resources.
What's more, while the co-determination aspect of the proposal does
draw inspiration from Germany, fundamentally, the pitch for the overall
package is a lot closer to "Make America Great Again" than to "make
America like Scandinavia." The basic notion is that the American private
sector used to operate in a better, more inclusive way before the rise
of shareholder supremacy and with a couple of firm regulatory kicks we
can get it to work that way again.
My late grandfather, who was an old-line communist in his day, used
to tell me with mixed admiration and regret that FDR had saved capitalism
by entrenching institutions that guaranteed broadly shared prosperity.
Those institutions, fundamentally, are what was undone in the shareholder
value revolution.
Warren and her new allies are betting is that at a time when the
political right is increasingly not even bothering to pretend to offer
economic solutions anymore, America can pull off the same trick a second
time -- offering the public not a huge new expansion of government programs,
but a revival of the midcentury stakeholder capitalism that once built a
middle class so prosperous that the idea of surging mass interest in
socialism was unthinkable.
Trump keeps complaining about the Fed while appointing people who don't
agree with his complaints. Yglesias adds, 'He's very bad at doing his
job." Still, that ignores the extent the Fed has been captured by the
interests it's supposed to regulate.
It's ridiculous that it's unconstitutional for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
to run for president. No, it isn't. And no, we didn't miss a precious
opportunity by barring Arnold Schwarzenegger from running for president.
There are ridiculous things in the Constitution, but this isn't one of
them. And even if it were, the political climate is so corrupt these days
I'd rather go with what we got than risk a Constitutional Convention.
Still, if we were to change the rules on presidential eligibility, I'd
go more restrictive, not less. In particular, I'd like to see children
and spouses of presidents barred from running. Too bad they didn't write
that into the 22nd Amendment.
Why criticism of Amazon isn't sticking. "Despite an elite backlash,
the public still loves a good deal."
Good riddance to John Kelly:
No person's entire career can be summed up in a single quote. But ousted
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's defense to the charge that the
Trump administration's child separation policy at the border was cruel
deserves to be etched into his tombstone.
"The children," he said, "will be taken care of -- put into foster care
or whatever."
That is roughly the degree of thoughtfulness and consideration that was
put into the policy. And it properly reflects Kelly's true legacy as chief
of staff.
More on Kelly and his job:
The Trump-era threat to democracy is the opposite of populism.
Gavin Newsom promised to fix California's housing crisis. Here's a bill
that would do it. "A bold vision for denser construction, this time
with more tenant protections."
Democrats need some 2020 Senate candidates. Points out that the map
is currently very strongly skewed in favor of Republicans (median state
is R+6%), so Democrats will be hard pressed to gain enough seats in 2020
to make a difference (and failing to do so will drastically hurt their
chances of implementing much-needed reforms). I would add that I've long
considered Congress to be much more important than the Presidency. The
first (and almost only, aside from war issues) question I'd ask of any
Democratic presidential candidate is what are you doing to build up the
party down-ballot. (Anyone who starts to answer that with "I" is suspect.)
The ongoing power grabs in Wisconsin and Michigan should remind Democrats
that if the 2020 election leaves Republicans in charge of the Senate, they
will likely use that authority in unprecedented and aggressive ways that
make it completely impossible to govern. And while the presidency is a more
important office than any single Senate seat, the recruitment of quality
candidates probably matters more on the Senate side precisely because the
map is so skewed. It's completely understandable that individual ambitious
politicians are gazing at the White House, but party leaders, operatives,
donors, elder statespeople, etc. have a serious obligation to discourage
this trend and push talented politicians into the Senate races where they
are needed.
The Weekly Standard's demise is a reminder that there are some idea worse
than Trumpism: "The most principled resistance to Trump comes from
conservatism's most dangerous faction." Regardless of how much snark
William Kristol et al. direct at Trump, you should never forget Kristol's
role in formulating and promoting the neoconservative capture of American
foreign policy, especially their embrace of permanent war, the only state
possible given that any equitable peace must be rejected as a sign of
weakness.
Yet the demise of the Weekly Standard is not exactly a disastrous blow
to American intellectual life. The independence from Trump's perspective
was welcome, but unfortunately, that doesn't mean its brand of conservatism
was any better than that of the ranting demagogue. In fact, it was arguably
more damaging in terms of its concrete impact on the world.
There's so much on war and empire here that Yglesias doesn't bother with
Kristol's most important directive: that Republicans should never compromise
on health care policy. This dates back to Clinton's 1990s proposal, defeat
of which really put Kristol on the map, and set the standard for Republican
obstruction and rejection of all reforms -- even when Obama had lined up all
of the interested business lobbies to support ACA. Until Trump came around,
Kristol was at the center of virtually every malign direction in American
politics. It's worth noting that Weekly Standard never paid its way. From
day one, it was a subsidized propaganda organ, doing the bidding of wealthy
owners and sponsors. Its failure signals declining utility: evidently, in
the Trump era the right no longer needs clever sophists like Kristol who
can appeal to elites. Going forward, mass delusion will have to suffice.
More links on Weekly Standard:
I also read pieces by
Franklin Foer and
John Judis that try much too hard to show Weekly Standard respect.
Despite congressional pressure, Amtrak can't get its story straight on
train-boarding rules.
The $21 trillion Pentagon accounting error that can't pay for Medicare-for-all,
explained.
Ross Barkan: Clean water: the latest casualty in Trump's attack on the
environment. Also:
Sharon Lerner: Trump's Attack on the Clean Water Act Will Fuel Destructive
Pipeline Boom.
Charles Duhigg: The Real Roots of American Rage: A long piece on "the
untold story of how anger became the dominant emotion in our politics and
personal lives -- and what we can do about it." Starts by showing how anger
can actually facilitate communication and lead to more understanding, but
that isn't what we're seeing in politics today, especially coming from the
right (although the author clearly would like to spread the blame around
all sides of political spectrum).
When we scrutinize the sources of our anger, we should see clearly that
our rage is often being stoked not for our benefit but for someone else's.
If we can stop and see the anger merchants' self-serving motives, we can
perhaps start to loosen their grip on us.
Yet we can't pin the blame entirely on the anger profiteers. At the
heart of much of our discontent is a very real sense that our government
systems are broken. . . . Many of the nation's most contentious issues
are driven by a feeling that our institutions have failed us. Historically,
this feeling has been at the root of some of America's most important
movements for change. Ours, too, could be a moment for progress, if we
can channel our anger to good ends, rather than the vanquishing of our
enemies.
It may be that anger is pretty broadly distributed in America these
days, but one particularly nasty form of anger is almost exclusively
embodied in Trump's political theater: I don't usually recommend video,
but see Adam Serwer's explication,
Trump and His Supporters Thrive on Cruelty.
Charles Dunst/Krishnadev Calamur: Trump Moves to Deport Vietnam War
Refugees.
Lee Fang: Billionaire Republican Donors Helped Elect Rising Centrist
Democrats.
David A Farenthold/Matt Zapotosky/Seung Min Kim: Mounting legal threats
surround Trump as nearly every organization he has led is under
investigation.
More links:
George T Conway III/Trevor Potter/Neal Katyal: Trump's claim that he didn't
violate campaign finance law is weak -- and dangerous. "The case against
the president would be far stronger than the case against John Edwards was."
Edwards was prosecuted (but acquitted) for paying off a mistress during his
presidential campaign.
Jen Kirby: What you need to know about accused Russian spy Maria Butina's
plea deal.
Andrew Prokop: What's next for the Trump hush money investigation, and
The Trump inauguration is now being criminally investigated.
Asha Rangappa: Mueller should try to indict Trump. It would guarantee his
report goes public.
James Risen: Is There Anything Trump, Cohen, and Manafort Didn't Lie About?
Aaron Rupar: What's illegal about Trump's hush payments to women, briefly
explained. Not only were the payments effectively political contributions,
they were strategically important, perhaps even decisive, ones. The payments
kept two stories of extramarital affairs out of the media during the last
few weeks of the campaign. Had the stories broke then, they would have been
big deals in the media, especially as they would add credence to the "grab
them by the pussy" bus tape, much as Comey re-opening the investigation of
Hillary Clinton's emails dredged up that whole back story. That, quite
conceivably, could have turned the election, and spared us most of the
last two years. You might be inclined to argue that such stories shouldn't
have mattered, but given media attitudes to sex and scandal, you know it
did matter. Rupar also wrote:
"You can make anything a crime": Republicans shrug at Trump being implicated
in felonies.
Rebecca Solnit: Trump's countless scams are finally catching up to him.
Jeffrey Toobin: Adam Schiff's Plans to Obliterate Trump's Red Line:
"With the Democrats controlling the House, Schiff's congressional
investigation will follow the money."
Umair Irfan: Ryan Zinke to resign as Interior Secretary at the end of
the year. Subheds: "Ryan Zinke racked up a long list of scandals";
"Zinke was an ideologue who served fossil fuel interests"; "Zinke
worked to drastically weaken environmental protections." Until Trump
finds someone worse, he will leave the department to "deputy David
Bernhardt, a former oil executive." Also see:
Robinson Meyer: Ryan Zinke Is the Blue Wave's First Casualty:
Every single one of these initiatives is almost certain to continue under
Bernhardt. What will not continue is Zinke's penchant for publicity. . . .
That hubris made him a terrific target for Democrats. They hoped to use
his personal misdeeds to point to the larger pattern of deregulation and
industry friendliness at his department. . . .
In resigning, Zinke reveals the power of Democrats' new ability to
oversee the Trump administration. Zinke is the first casualty of the 2018
blue wave: the first Cabinet official who stepped down in the face of
subpoenas. He left, in fact, to avoid facing subpoenas. Yet in
resigning, he also shows the limits of that same new power. Democrats
can no longer use Zinke's hubris to get people to pay attention to the
Trump administration's larger set of policies at Interior.
Irfan also wrote:
Countries have forged a climate deal in Poland -- despite Trump:
not sure the article justifies the headline (not that the dig against
Trump isn't warranted). Also see:
Carolyn Kormann: How the US Squandered Its Leadership at the UN Climate
Conference; also:
Emily Atkin: Have the Democrats Hit a Tipping Point on Climate Change?
The latter notes that Democrats have talked much more about climate change
since Trump was elected, especially after Trump's denialism became so all
consuming.
Jen Kirby: The Senate just passed a resolution to end US support for the
Saudi war in Yemen. Also:
Tara Golshan: The bizarre story of Democrats helping Republicans stall
action on Yemen: "Everyone had the same question: Why didn't House
Democratic leadership fight harder?" Also related here:
Samuel Oakford: Washington Sends the Saudis a Long-Overdue Bill.
Also of interest here:
David D Kirkpatrick/Ben Hubbard/Mark Landler/Mark Mazzetti: The Wooing
of Jared Kushner: How the Saudis Got a Friend in the White House.
George Monbiot: How US billionaires are fuelling the hard-right cause
in Britain. You know, it's not like Putin invented the idea of trying
to influence foreign elections.
George Packer: The Corruption of the Republican Party: "The GOP is
best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own
corruption from the start." He's not the sharpest analyst (nor the
clearest writer) but I'm pretty sure he's not blaming it all on Lincoln --
more like the Goldwater/Reagan conservative ascendancy, which founded a
political vehicle for elite capitalism fueled by cultural resentment,
first and foremost of white racists. Five of the six states Goldwater
carried were the core of the Confederate Slave Power, and they've
remained solid Republican ever since. One mistake Packer makes is in
positing the existence of "conservatives who still believed in democracy."
Conservatives, pretty much by definition, never have believed in any such
thing. At best, they give it a little lip service, but deep down their
great fear is that people will realize that they can use their votes to
create more equality, and thereby limit the power of the rich. Nothing
does more to sow doubt in the masses than to turn government into a vast
cesspool of corruption.
Kim Phillips-Fein: Atlas Weeps: Better title (the link caption): "The
Bad History -- and Bad Politics -- of Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge's
Capitalism in America." Review of a book you won't want to read but
could use a brief report on.
Nomi Prins: A World That Is the Property of the 1%: "The inequality
gap on a planet growing more extreme."
Ola Salem: Saudi Arabia Declares War on America's Muslim Congresswomen.
Kind of like the way Israel attacks Jewish-American critics while cozying
up to right-wing Americans; see, e.g.,
Katherine Franke: The pro-Israel Push to Purge US Campus Critics.
Li Zhou: Arizona Sen. John Kyl is officially stepping down on December
31: "Arizona will get two new senators in 2019." One elected, one
not. Zhou also wrote:
Republicans' civil war over criminal justice reform, explained.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, December 2, 2018
Weekend Roundup
Any week since Trump became president, spend a day or two and you'll
come up with a fairly long list of pieces worth citing, and the sense
that you're still missing much of what is going on. For instance, my
usual sources on Israel/Palestine have yet to catch up with this:
Josef Federman: Israeli Police Recommend Indicting Netanyahu on Bribery
Charges. Seems like that should be at least as big a story as
Putin and Saudi crown prince high-five at G20 summit. But this
is all I came up with for the week.
I probably should have written standalone pieces on GWH Bush and on
Jill Lepore's These Truths, but wound up squeezing some notes
here for future reference. Under Bush, I wondered how many articles I'd
have to read -- critical as well as polite or even adulatory -- before
someone would bring up what I regard as the critical juncture in his
period as president: his invasion of Panama. I lost track, but in 20-30
pieces I looked at, none broached the topic. I had to search specifically
before I came up with this one:
Greg Grandin: How the Iraq War Began in Panama. When Bush became
president, people still talked about a "Vietnam syndrome" which inhibited
American politicians and their generals from starting foreign wars. Bush
is generally credited as having "kicked the Vietnam syndrome," with two
aggressive wars, first in Panama, then in Iraq. Bush and the media
conspired to paint those wars as glorious successes, the glow from
which enabled Clinton, Bush II, and Obama to launch many more wars:
Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), Syria, as well as
dozens of more marginal operations. Woodrow Wilson once claimed to
be fighting "a war to end all wars." Bush's legacy was more modest:
a war to kindle many more wars.
Oddly enough, the story below that links up most directly to Bush's
legacy of war is the one about the increasing rate of premature deaths
(suicides and overdoses). That's what you get from decades of nearly
continuous war since Bush invaded Panama in 1989. The other contributing
factor has been increasing income inequality, which has followed a straight
line ever since 1981, when the Reagan/Bush administration slashed taxes on
the rich.
Recently, we've seen many naive people praise Bush for, basically, not
being as flat-out awful as his Republican successors. They've done this
without giving the least thought to how we got to where we are now. The
least they could do is check out Kevin Phillips' 2004 book: American
Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House
of Bush.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias: President George H.W. Bush dies at 94: First line
here took me aback: "George H.W. Bush was a genuinely excellent president
responsible for historic achievements that are often overlooked because
of the arbitrary way we value presidential legacies." Indeed, my first
reaction was to look up how old Yglesias was when Bush was president: 7
when Bush was elected in 1988 and took office in 1989, 11 when Bush lost
in 1992 and left office in 1993. For comparison, I was 10-13 while John
Kennedy was president, and while I remember the 1960 election and a fair
amount from that period, most of what I know about those years I learned
later. The times were different, but I suspect a similar dynamic, as we
tend to view past presidents through the prism of their successors. Bush
had the good fortune to be followed by two much worse Republicans -- his
eldest son, and now Donald Trump. Yglesias would have us believe that Bush
was "the last of the Republican pragmatists," because his successors have
been very different: basically, ideological culture warriors -- the son
sometimes tried to hide it, which in turn has helped to rehabilitate him
relative to Trump. On the other hand, what I found most striking in Bush's
career was his role in normalizing, at every step along the way, the
right-wing descent of the Republican Party. Not that he was ever my idea
of a decent, principled Republican -- and note that there actually were
some in 1966, when he was first elected to Congress -- but two changes
he made c. 1980 are indicative: when he joined the anti-abortion forces,
and when he shelved his critique of "voodoo economics" to embrace Reagan.
Those shifts were opportunistic more than pragmatic. They were moves he
could make because he was empty inside, little more than a hack serving
the class interests of his benefactors -- much like his Senator father
had done, and as his sons would do. Jack Germond liked to call him "an
empty suit." Yglesias is pretty selective about what he mentions and
what he leaves out. (Perhaps we should have an office pool on how many
Bush articles I read before anyone mentions Panama?) He does mention
the Iraq War as some kind of internationalist success, not mentioning
any connection to the thirty years of recurring chaos and conflict that
ensued. On the other hand, he doesn't mention two generally positive
foreign policy things that happened under Bush: a fairly broad shift
to democracy (including wins by left-ish political movements) in Latin
America, and pressure on Israel to negotiate peace (leading to the Oslo
Accords, which Clinton allowed Netanyahu and Barak to undermine).
Other Bush links:
Peter Beinart: What the Tributes to George HW Bush Are Missing: "The
41st president was the last person to occupy the Oval Office whose opponents
saw him as fully legitimate." Beinart attributes that to his WASP heritage,
and to the fact that he was elected with a majority of the votes -- something
only Barack Obama has since achieved -- but it really has more to do with
the security and sensibility of the opposition. Democrats controlled Congress
when Bush was president, and saw him as someone who would work with them.
On the other hand, Republicans saw Clinton as an usurper and a threat, and
dispensed with all pretenses of bipartisanship. When Obama came in, they
simply doubled down, opting for pure obstructionism. Democrats didn't react
to Republican presidents with such venom, but both Bush and Trump entered
office after having lost the popular vote, and both pursued hard-right,
strictly partisan agendas.
Ariel Dorfman: George HW Bush thought the world belonged to his family.
How wrong he was.
Franklin Foer: The Last WASP President: Not literally true, not
figuratively either, inadvertently showing the lengths some people
have to take to come up with a hook to hang Bush on. For example:
Take his record on race. Bush comes from a Yankee tradition that prides
itself on its liberal attitudes. His father, a senator from Connecticut,
sponsored legislation desegregating schools, protecting voting rights,
and establishing an equal-employment commission. George H. W. Bush
seemed to accept this as his patrimony. At Yale, he lead a fund-raising
drive for the United Negro College Fund. When he moved to Midland, Texas,
he made a point of inviting the head of the local NAACP to his house for
dinner. As the chairman of the Harris County GOP, he put the party's
money in a black-owned bank.
Of course, the next paragraph had to bring up "the notorious Willie
Horton ad," and the following one notes:
After so accurately decrying Voodoo Economics, he joined the administration
that enshrined them. He stood by Reagan as he opposed sanctions against
South Africa's apartheid regime, and as the administration mounted a
crusade against "reverse discrimination," an effort to undo affirmative
action.
The problem is that if the only reason you exhibit "liberal attitudes"
is for show, there's nothing to keep you from ditching them as soon as
the fashion changes. Personal aside here: I never heard of "WASP" until
I went to a college where more than half of the students were Jewish,
although I've also heard non-Jewish northeasterners use the term. It
was one of several identities I was grouped in but never thought of
myself as belonging to (including its constituent parts: white,
Anglo-Saxon, and protestant). But I picked up the term, even if it
rarely meant much to me. About the only time I've thought of it
lately was in regards to the Supreme Court. For much of American
history, the Supreme Court was exclusively a WASP club. That changed
a bit with Louis Brandeis, but remained pretty much the norm into
the 1980s. Since then Republicans have almost exclusively nominated
Catholics (including Clarence Thomas), and Democrats mostly Jews,
until at present we have six Catholics, three Jews, and no WASPS on
the Supreme Court. I suppose you could credit Bush with nominating
the last of the liberal WASP justices (David Souter) -- one of those
things that right-wing Republicans never forgave him for, even though
he clearly didn't mean to offend them. His other Supreme Court pick
was Thomas.
Mehdi Hasan: The Ignored Legacy of George HW Bush: War Crimes, Racism,
and Obstruction of Justice: Much about Iraq, but still no mention
of Panama.
Laura McGann: Eight women say George HW Bush groped them. Their claims
deserve to be remembered as we assess his legacy.
Rachel Withers: George HW Bush's "Willie Horton" ad will always be the
reference point for dog whistle racism. Withers also wrote:
Trump praises George HW Bush, the president whose vision he recently
mocked (hoary picture here: note how close the Clintons and Bushes
are); and
George HW Bush's state funeral arrangements: what we know.
Other Yglesias pieces this week:
Jason Ditz: UN Confirms US Airstrike in Helmand Killed 23 Civilians:
News reports focused last week on unapologetic murderers giving each other
high-fives at the G20 summit in Argentina, but week-by-week the US proves
to be the real killing machine. Also by Ditz:
US Says SW Libya Airstrike Kills 11 al-Qaeda 'Suspects';
Observatory: US Airstrikes Kill Dozens in Eastern Syria. If you're
surprised that the US is (still) bombing in Libya, learn about AFRICOM:
Nick Turse: US Military Says It Has a "Light Footprint" in Africa. These
Documents Show a Vast Network of Bases. Back to Afghanistan, consider:
Danny Sjursen: America Is Headed for Military Defeat in Afghanistan.
Marc Fisher: Trump borrows his rhetoric -- and his view of power -- from
the mob.
Bernard E Harcourt: How Trump Fuels the Fascist Right: I think this
gives him credit for deliberation that he probably doesn't deserve, but
here's the argument:
Everything about Trump's discourse -- the words he uses, the things he
is willing to say, when he says them, where, how, how many times -- is
deliberate and intended for consumption by the new right. When Trump
repeatedly accuses a reporter of "racism" for questioning him about his
embrace of the term "nationalist," he is deliberately drawing from the
toxic well of white supremacist discourse and directly addressing that
base. Trump's increasing use of the term "globalist" in interviews and
press conferences -- including to describe Jewish advisers such as Gary
Cohn or Republican opponents like the Koch brothers -- is a knowing use
of an anti-Semitic slur, in the words of the Anti-Defamation League, "a
code word for Jews." Trump's self-identification as a "nationalist,"
especially in contrast to "globalists" like George Soros, extends a hand
to white nationalists across the country. His pointed use of the term
"politically correct," especially in the context of the Muslim ban,
speaks directly to followers of far-right figures such as William Lind,
author of "What is 'Political Correctness'?"
Trump is methodically engaging in verbal assaults that throw fuel on
his political program of closed borders, nativism, social exclusion, and
punitive excess. Even his cultivated silences and failures to condemn
right-wing violence, in the fatal aftermath of the Unite the Right rally
in Charlottesville, for instance, or regarding the pipe-bombing suspect
Cesar Sayoc, communicate directly to extremists. We are watching, in real
time, a new right discourse come to define the American presidency. The
term "alt-right" is too innocuous when the new political formation we
face is, in truth, neo-fascist, white-supremacist, ultranationalist, and
counterrevolutionary. Too few Americans appear to recognize how extreme
President Trump has become -- in part because it is so disturbing to
encounter the arguments of the American and European new right.
Umair Irfan: Sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, explained.
Jen Kirby: USMCA, the new trade deal between the US, Canada, and Mexico,
explained: Not all that different from NAFTA. One thing to keep in
mind is that when it comes to trade deals, the conflicts are less between
countries than between companies and people (workers, customers, and the
governments should they be tempted to challenge the companies). Also:
Paul Krugman: When MAGA Fantasy Meets Rust Belt Reality: Posits
two possible meanings of Make America Great Again: "a promise to restore
the kind of economy we had 40 or 50 years ago -- an economy that still
offered lots of manly jobs in manufacturing and mining"; and "a promise
to return to the good old days of raw racism and sexism." Krugman argues
that the former would be an impossible task even if Trump had a clue,
which he clearly does not -- most of this piece explains why. As for the
racism/sexism, Krugman does concede that "Trump is delivering on that
promise." I think he's overly generous there: sure, Trump knows how to
be racist and sexist, but are people following his lead or resisting it,
and are they making a real difference in the world? Maybe, a little bit,
but not so much as to actually satisfy Trump's supporters.
Krugman also wrote:
The Depravity of Climate-Change Denial. I agree with most of what he
says here, but take exception to: "climate change isn't just killing people;
it may well kill civilization." That's really excessive hyperbole, the sort
of thing that lets deniers present themselves as skeptics vs. alarmists --
I read a letter in the Wichita Eagle last week that used that ploy. Even
fairly large climate shifts (say on the order of +6°C/10°F), while causing
large economic dislocations (as a first guess, North Dakota becomes Kansas,
and Kansas becomes Coahuila), are things people can readily adapt to easy
enough. Maybe overall habitability is diminished a bit (you lose land to
rising sea levels, but you gain utility from arctic lands; perhaps more
ominously, tropical diseases will spread). But unless climate change
triggers cataclysmic war, that's nothing civilization cannot handle.
I've long thought that people who think about climate change tend to
exaggerate its effects and importance, so I'm not surprised to find
the level of hysteria grow as evidence mounts and parties vested in
carbon fuel continue to thwart even modest attempts to reduce the risk.
Still, I doubt the solution is to ramp the rhetoric up to apocalyptic
levels.
German Lopez: After a mall shooting, police killed the wrong person --
and the real shooter remains at large: The mall was in Alabama.
The dead bystander was black. A follow-up article explains:
PR Lockhart: The Alabama mall shooting highlights the dangers of
owning a gun while black.
Ella Nilsen: House Democrats unveil their first bill in the majority: a
sweeping anti-corruption proposal: To be introduced as House Resolution
1, no chance of passing the Republican Senate let alone of overriding a
Trump veto, but this stakes out high ground from which to investigate
and judge the most thoroughly corrupt administration in US history. Also:
Akela Lacy: In Democrats' First Bill, There's a Quiet Push to Make Public
Campaign Finance a Reality.
David Roberts: I'm an environmental journalist, but I never write about
overpopulation. Here's why.
Jennifer Rubin: Trump has done nothing for rural Americans.
Aaron Rupar: Michael Cohen's plea deal shows that Russia did have something
on Trump.
Other links on Cohen:
Dylan Scott: Under Trump, the number of uninsured kids is suddenly
rising. Note that the chart shows a steady decrease in number
of uninsured children from 2008 through 2016, before the rise in
2017.
Dylan Scott: Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith wins Mississippi Senate
election: Duly noted, by a 54-46% margin. You know why. Still,
that's a lot closer than Mississippi split since, uh, the 1870s.
For more, see:
Bob Moser: Don't Hate Mississippi:
It's never a shock to see white Mississippians cover themselves in shame.
They've been doing it reliably throughout the entire history of a place
that became known as the "lynching state" long before the inceptions of
the Confederacy, the Klan, or Jim Crow. . . . In politics, too, white
Mississippians have always put passion -- for white supremacy and black
subjugation -- above all pragmatic considerations. With clockwork
regularity, every election, they've chosen to keep their state an
economic and educational backwater, an international symbol of America's
racial lunacy.
Emily Stewart: GM is closing plants and cutting jobs. Here's what it
means for workers -- and for Trump.
Julissa Treviño: Suicides are at the highest rate in decades, CDC report
shows: Up 33 percent since 1999, up 2000 from 2016 to 2017, something
which gets less press than the number of drug overdoses, which has surged
to even higher levels. On the latter, see:
German Lopez: Drug overdose deaths were so bad in 2017, they reduced overall
life expectancy. Also see:
Lenny Bernstein: US life expectancy declines again, a dismal trend not
seen since World War I.
Alex Ward: Russia just openly attacked Ukraine. That could mean their
war will get worse. Like virtually all western reports, this is
rather slanted, but the crisis is significant. Basic background: after
anti-Russian, pro-West political factions in Ukraine affected a coup
in 2014, removing a more/less democratically elected Russia-friendly
president, several regions of Ukraine with large Russian demographics
revolted, especially Crimea and Donbass. Russia encouraged (and perhaps
orchestrated) these revolts, including a declaration by local officials
in Crimea of their intent to be annexed by Russia. There was a vote in
Crimea to join Russia, which was boycotted by opponents, so carried by
a large margin. Crimea has been under Russian control since then, and
the ties were made literal by the construction of a 12-mile bridge over
the Kerch Strait between Russia and Crimea. Since 2014, there has been
sporadic and indecisive fighting in Donbass and along the border, and
Ukraine (and its Western allies) has refused to recognize any changes.
The Kerch Strait separates the Sea of Azov from the Black Sea and the
Mediterranean, so it remains an important shipping lane for Ukraine, as
well as for Russia. With the opening of the bridge, Ukraine attempted
to reassert its rights to send naval ships through the Kerch Strait,
and Russia responded by blockading the channel, seizing the ships, and
imprisoning the sailors: that's what "openly attacked" means in the
headline above. Russia charged Ukraine with a "well-thought-out
provocation." For a counter view, see:
Ted Galen Carpenter: Ukraine Doesn't Deserve America's Blind Support.
Julian E Zelizer: Why the US Can't Solve Big Problems.
The federal government released a devastating report last week documenting
the immense economic and human cost that the U.S. will incur as a result
of climate change. It warns that the damage to roads alone will add up to
$21 billion by the end of the century. In certain parts of the Midwest,
farms will produce 75 percent less corn than today, while ocean acidification
could result in $230 billion in financial losses. More people will die from
extreme temperatures and mosquito-borne diseases. Wildfire seasons will
become more frequent and more destructive. Tens of millions of people living
near rising oceans will be forced to resettle. The findings put the country
on notice, once again, that doing nothing is a recipe for disaster.
Yet odds are that the federal government will, in fact, do nothing. It's
tempting to blame inaction on current political conditions, like having a
climate change denier in the White House or intense partisan polarization
in Washington. But the unfortunate reality is that American politicians
have never been good at dealing with big, long-term problems. Lawmakers
have tended to act only when they had no other choice.
Finally, here are some links reviewing Jill Lepore's big book
These Truths: A History of the United States (recently read by
me):
The Wilentz piece is probably the best of the bunch -- at least I found
myself agreeing with most of the substantive criticisms. It occurs to me
that there are two basic models for writing a 700+ page history of the US
from colonial times to Donald Trump: either briefly sum up most of the
stuff most people already know, or assume that readers already know that
stuff and add little side-glances they don't know that help round out the
picture. Lepore did the latter, and included a lot of material I didn't
especially know before. She also limited her focus to the ebb and flow of
ideals, corruptions, and manipulations in politics. I was surprised, for
instance, that from the 1930s on she focused mostly on the development of
polling and campaign management, which sort of logically led to Trump --
she actually gets to Trump before 2000, Bush-Gore, and Obama. But even
earlier, she spent a good deal of time on the rise of the partisan press
c. 1800, and the shift toward non-partisan journalism from the 1880s on
(papers like the New York Times, and later the big three TV networks).
Worth reading, but not for many clear lessons. A much more pointed book
on founders and ideals is Ganesh Sitaraman's The Crisis of the
Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our
Republic. But then I suppose she'd reply that history is always
messy, never cut and dried.
One more point to make: These Truths differs from most US
history books in that Lepore makes a conscious effort to recognize
and treat fairly everyone -- not just the dominant white males that
traditionally get all the pages. She balances off natives against
colonizers, slaves against slaveholders, women against men, and (to
a lesser extent) laborers against captains of industry. She writes
as much about Jane Franklin as her brother Ben, and as much about
Harry Washington as his one-time owner George. She writes way too
much about Phyllis Schlafly (but also Donald Trump, who probably
wouldn't have garnered a mention had she finished the book three
years earlier).
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Weekend Roundup
Seems like it's been a slow news week, probably because the holiday
both cut into the political world's capacity for misdeeds and my (and
others') attention span. I'm also preoccupied with music poll matters.
Still, figured I should at least briefly go through the motions, if
only to keep the record reasonably intact.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias: House Democrats don't need a leader, they need someone
to represent them on TV: I see two basic knocks on Pelosi as Speaker:
one is the sense of failure with the 2010 and subsequent losses; another
is that in many parts of the country Republicans have been able to use
her (so-called radical agenda) to scare voters. (This was painfully clear
in my own district, which voted solidly Republican, despite an exceptional
Democratic candidate.) As far as I can tell, Pelosi is moderate-left by
national standards, but her district in San Francisco could easily support
someone further left. I suspect that most Democrats would prefer for her
to step aside and let someone else (younger and more charismatic) take
over, but as it is the only challengers are coming from the right -- not
because the caucus wants to move right but because some winners in close
districts pledged to vote against her. Yglesias finds a third knock against
her: that she's not very effective on TV either representing her party or
parrying against Trump. He suggests designating someone else to take the
publicity role, limiting her to in-house strategizing (which she's arguably
good at). I'm reminded here that in Britain they have an interesting system
where the opposition party designates a "shadow cabinet" -- one member for
each cabinet position, so there's always a recognized point person for
whatever issues crop up. A big advantage there is that it would open up
more prominent roles for more people. Might even be . . . more democratic.
Other Yglesias pieces:
There's nothing "America First" about Trump's Saudi policy: Worth
including not just the links but the linked-to titles in this quote:
President Donald Trump must be giving thanks this morning for press
coverage of his extraordinarily inappropriate statement on the murder
of dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi
[
Zack Beauchamp: Trump's Khashoggi statement is a green light for
murder].
Trump has secretive sources of income and murky financial ties to
Saudi interests
[
America deserves to know how much money Trump is getting from the Saudi
government], and keeps touting entirely bogus statistics about the
jobs impact of arms sales to Saudi Arabia
[
Trump says selling weapons to Saudi Arabia will create a lot of jobs.
That's not true.]. Nevertheless, much of the coverage of his statement
simply takes at face value his assertions that his handling of this issue
is driven by American interests -- rather than by his own self-interest or
the interests of his donors in the defense contracting industry.
Yglesias argues that "America has a strong interest in curtailing
murder." I agree that America should have such an interest, but can't
think of many examples of pre-Trump US governments doing anything like
that. The US continued to support Pinochet when his agents gunned down
a Chilean dissenter in the streets of Washington -- probably the most
similar incident, but far from unique. The US has long and lavishly
supported Israel's targeted assassination programs -- the model for
America's even more extensive "drone warfare" program. More generally,
the US supported "death squads" in Latin America and elsewhere, as
well as providing intelligence, training, and weapons to "security
forces" -- Indonesia's slaughter of 500,000 "communists" is one of
the more striking examples. Then there are arms sales in support of
aggressive wars, such as the one Saudi Arabia is waging in Yemen.
Or you can point to the US refusal to support the International
Criminal Court. You can argue that Trump is even worse than past
US presidents in this regard -- both for his tasteless embrace of
flagrant killers like Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and
for his slavish devotion to "allies" like Saudi Arabia and Israel --
but he's mostly just following past practices (even if he seems to
be enjoying them too much).
The more interesting question is why has the murder of Khashoggi
different? I don't have time to trot my theories out there, but even
if anti-Islam bigotry is part of the equation, the basic realization
that governments shouldn't go around killing their dissidents is one
more people should embrace more consistently.
The time Nancy Pelosi saved Social Security: Credits Pelosi with
blocking the privatization scheme GW Bush claimed as his mandate after
winning the 2004 election. I never thought the scheme had a chance,
because I knew they could never afford to bridge the gap between
pay-as-you-go and funded schemes (even a far-from-adequately funded
one). But sure, give Pelosi credit for her blanket rejection of all
Republican schemes. A big problem that Democrats had all through the
Reagan-Bush-Bush years has been their callow willingness to accept
(and legitimize) conservative talking points, so it's good to point
to examples where they didn't, and saved themselves. Also on Pelosi:
Ella Nilsen: Why House progressives have Nancy Pelosi's back.
The 2016 election really was dominated by a controversy over emails.
Does a good job of summing up the view that media and ultimately voter
perception of the 2016 election was decisively dominated by the "email
scandal" -- the Gallup Daily Tracking word cloud shows this graphically,
but there are many other telling details. Why is a question that remains
unanswered. Is it really just as simple as the endless repetition -- by
the partisan right-wing media, echoed by mainstream media that covered
propaganda as news -- or was there such underlying dislike and distrust
of Clinton that let such a trivial mistake (at worst) signify some kind
of deeply disturbing character flaw? And if so, why didn't Trump's own
obvious character flaws disqualify him? One thing well established by
polling is that both candidates were viewed negatively by most people,
yet when forced to choose, a decisive number of Americans opted to rid
themselves of Clinton to tip the election to the equally (or more, but
not more deeply) disliked Trump.
The Beto O'Rourke 2020 buzz, explained: "hey, losing a high-profile
Senate race was good enough for Abraham Lincoln.".
Arthur C Brooks: How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart: Head of
American Enterprise Institute, pushing a Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) book,
Them: Why We Hate Each Other, blaming America's numerous woes
on cultural factors. I think that may have some superficial validity,
but only after taking a hard look at inequality, powerlessness, and
perpetual war.
Matthew Choi: Trump hits back at Chief Justice Roberts, escalating an
extraordinary exchange: Roberts is no hero for a judicial system
and sense of justice that transcends party and respects all people, but
he reminds us that many conservatives (and, by the way, most liberals)
at least go through the motions of wanting to be seen in that light.
Trump clearly sees no point in looking beyond political tags -- in
part, no doubt, because his grasp of actual issues is so shallow, but
but mostly because he's convinced that naked, blatant partisanship
gives him an out from any charges of malfeasance (just blame "fake
news" and your fans will rally behind you). Trump took the same tack in
attacking Admiral Bill McRaven after McRaven had the temerity to
note that Trump's ravings about the "fake news" media constitute a
threat to American democracy. Trump's first thought was that he could
dismiss McRaven by calling him a "Hillary supporter." Clearly, he
relishes another presidential campaign against Clinton -- probably
figuring she's the only Democrat he can still whip.
Aaron Gell: The Unbearable Rightness of Seth Abramson: On a
blogger who has deeply investigated the whole Trump-Russia thing,
publishing the book: Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed
America.
William D Hartung: America's Post-9/11 Wars Have Cost $5.9 Trillion:
"Not to mention 240,000 civilian deaths and 21 million displaced. And
yet a congressional commission is urging yet more money for a bloated
Pentagon." Also:
Murtaza Hussain: It's Time for America to Reckon With the Staggering
Death Toll of the Post-9/11 Wars, which puts the death toll twice
as high ("at least 480,000 people").
Rebecca Jennings: The death of small businesses in big cities, explained:
Interview with Jeremiah Moss.
Jen Kirby: Theresa May and the EU have a Brexit deal. What's next?
Andrew Kragie: Trump's New Kavanaugh for the US Court of Appeals:
Meet Neomi Rao.
Mark Landler: In Extraordinary Statement, Trump Stands With Saudis
Despite Khashoggi Killing. Also:
Karoun Demirjian: More Republicans challenge Trump on defense of Saudi
crown prince.
Dara Lind: Trump's reportedly cutting a deal to force asylum seekers to
wait in Mexico.
Bill McKibben: How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet. Also:
Robinson Meyer: A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday; and
David Sirota: Big Oil v the planet is the fight of our lives. Democrats
must choose a side.
Anna North: How Trump helped inspire a wave of strict new abortion
laws.
Daniel Politi: US Agents Fire Tear Gas at Migrants Approaching the Border
From Mexico.
Robert Reich: Break up Facebook (and while we're at it, Google, Apple
and Amazon): The sheer size of these four companies, each built to
dominate major niches on the internet, certainly suggests some sort of
antitrust remedy. (I'm less concerned here with physical products --
still most of what Apple produces, but tightly interwoven with their
network products, even more so for Google, Amazon, and we might as well
include Microsoft in this list.) On the other hand, given how important
network effects are to each of these businesses, they're more than a
little like natural monopolies, which occur in markets that are never
able to support healthy competition. The difference is that utilities
and such are most efficient with common infrastructure shared by all
customers, the winning vendor for services like Facebook (and Amazon)
is inevitably the first one with the widest network. The problem with
such monopolies is less the usual problem of restricting competition
than abuse of power. Moreover, where product monopolies tend to abuse
power by extorting high prices and/or delivering poor service, services
like Facebook and Google make their profits by exploiting their user
base (by capturing and reselling private information). It may not have
been obvious before Facebook that there was a public interest in social
media, and indeed one might never have developed had customers directly
had to bear the full development costs, but by now it's pretty clear
that: a) people want social media; b) that the market will be captured
by a single vendor; and c) that the profit motive will lead that vendor
to take advantage of and harm users. There is an obvious solution to
problems like this, and it isn't antitrust (not that there aren't cases
here for antitrust and/or other forms of regulation). The solution is
to build publicly funded non-profit utilities to provide web services
that are not subject to profit-seeking exploitation.
Dylan Scott: Bernie Sanders's new plan to bring down drug prices, briefly
explained: Better than nothing, I suppose, but this still assumes the
necessity of patents to incentivize profit-seeking companies to develop
new drugs. The main thing it does is to provide some limits on how much
drug companies can extort from customers and their insurers, and even
then depends on generics based on patent licensing to introduce a bit of
competition. A more immediately effective scheme would allow importation
of drugs from a much wider range of countries, ideally including ones
not beholden to US patent laws. (A compromise might be to allow a fixed
import tax to be claimed by the patent holder.) Better still would be to
eliminate patents altogether, and do research and development through
publicly-funded "open source" institutions around the world.
Dylan Scott: The Mississippi Senate runoff, Dems' last chance for one
more 2018 upset, explained: "Mike Espy could become the first
black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction." We, and for
that matter, the long-suffering people of Mississippi, should be
so lucky. Cindy Hyde-Smith tweet: "Did you know extremists like Cory
Booker are campaigning for Mike Espy here in MS?" Isn't Booker the
guy with all the big bank money behind him? Who's the real extremist
here?
Somini Sengupta: The World Needs to Quit Coal. Why Is It So Hard?
Emily Stewart: Ivanka Trump's personal email excuse shows she only wants
to seem competent some of the time: "She violated the rule by using
a personal email but wants you to believe she didn't know better."
Kaitlyn Tiffany: Wouldn't it be better if self-checkout just died?
A personal pet peeve. I, for one, pretty much never use the systems,
for lots of reasons, which start with I don't like machines lecturing
me. But then I guess I've never been good with authority figures, let
alone fascism.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Sunday, November 18, 2018
Weekend Roundup
No intro this week. A few updates but really not much on the elections,
let alone political futures for 2020. I barely managed to work in notice
of Israel's latest round of punitive bombings in Gaza. I'm sure there's
much more to it, but most of the links I did notice have to do with cease
fire negotiations (not going well, I gather) as opposed to why it happened
when. (I will note that this isn't the first time Israel launched a wave of
terror right after an American election.) I think there was also a story
about how last week was the first time the US defended Israel's occupation
of the Golan Heights, seized by Israel in the 1967 war. Another thing I
wanted to write about was the NY Times piece claiming that North Korea has
"snookered" Trump and is still developing missiles. I gather this has been
debunked in various places -- my wife is on top of this and other stories
I haven't had time for -- but I didn't land on a link that made sense of
it all. Also, I have no real opinions on possible leadership contests for
the Democrats in the new Congress. I've been pretty critical of both Nancy
Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the past, and no doubt will again in the future.
(Whenever I think of Schumer I'm reminded of a story about how he greeted
our friend Liz Fink on the street with his customary "how am I doing?" --
to which she answered, "you're evil, man.") Still, politics is a dirty
business, and no one can afford to get too bent out of shape over it.
Whoever wins, we'll support them when we can, and oppose them when we
must. That much never changes.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias pieces this week:
HQ2 is a perfect opportunity to massively upgrade the DC area's commuter
rail.
What the Amazon tax breaks really mean.
New Pew poll: the public prefers congressional Democrats to Trump on most
issues: Oddly enough, the two questions Trump leads are "Jobs and econ
growth" (44-33) and "Trade policy" (40-38), with "Taxes" near even (38-39).
Strongest Democratic advantages: "The environment" (55-19), "Ethics in
government" (48-22), "Medicare" (51-26), "Health care" (51-28), and "Social
Security" (48-26).
Trump's latest interview shows a president who's in way over his
head: "but what else is new?"
In some ways, the friendliest Donald Trump interviews are the most
revealing. Given the opportunity to ramble and free-associate without
any pushback whatsoever, you can see what channels his mind naturally
follows.
His latest interview with the Daily Caller shows a president who's
fundamentally out to sea. The sycophantic interviewers can't get Trump
to answer a policy question of any kind, no matter how much of a softball
they lob at him. The only subjects he is actually interested in talking
about are his deranged belief in his incredible popularity and how that
popularity is not reflected in actual vote totals because he's the victim
of a vast voter fraud conspiracy.
Actually a fairly long piece with a lot of excerpts backing up the
summary.
Trump's incompetence and authoritarianism are both scary: Takes
exception to a David Brooks tweet about Trump ("It's the incompetence,
not the authoritarianism we should be worried about"), nothing that
"autocrats are often incompetent." Indeed, you could argue that
authoritarianism is Trump's crutch against his own incompetence,
much like how people who cannot speak in the listener's language
think that more volume will do the trick. Brooks' tweet refers to
Jonathan V Last: The Vaporware Presidency, which sums Trump's
approach as: "Step 1: Propose something ridiculous. Step 2: Cause
chaos but don't deliver it. Lather, rinse, repeat." Yglesias offers
the example of promoting Thomas Homan to replace Kirstjen Nielsen
(Secretary of Homeland Security):
This is both stupid and authoritarian at the same time and for the
same reason.
Trump's primary interest is in putting people in place who will
aggressively support Trump rather than people who know what they
are doing. Consequently, he'd rather have a DHS head who suggests
arresting local politicians for disagreeing with Trump than a DHS
head who advises Trump to avoid doing illegal stuff.
This is simultaneously a recipe for vaporware and for autocracy.
Homan, at the end of the day, probably won't actually go around
arresting liberal mayors -- it's just something that sounded good
to say. But when you fill your Cabinet with people who make these
kinds of suggestions and make it clear that's what you want to hear
from your top lieutenants, sooner or later, someone goes and does it.
Even more inevitable is that those who don't follow through with
their stupid/authoritarian sound bites will be taunted for failure,
giving rise to ever more shameless opportunists.
What the 2018 results tell us about 2020: "Realistically, not
much." Actually, the main difference between presidential elections
and "mid-terms" (a term I've always hated) is turnout: about 60% vs.
40%. The big change in 2018 was that turnout jumped to almost 50%.
While Republicans have been very effective at getting their base out
to vote, that bump (relative to past "mid-terms") skewed Democratic.
In fact, at this point both parties have come to believe that their
fates will mostly be decided by voter turnout (hence the R's efforts
at voter suppression). The election also revealed two regional trends.
The Southwest from Texas to California has shifted toward the Democrats,
flipping Senate seats in Arizona and Nevada. You can chalk that up to
demography, further polarized by Trump's anti-immigrant policies. Also,
Trump's gains in the belt from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin and Iowa have
mostly evaporated. There's no reason to think that either of those
shifts will reverse in 2020. I can think of a half-dozen more points
to add in moving from 2018 to 2020, but should hold them back for a
longer essay. My point is that a lot happened in 2018 that bodes well
for Democrats looking forward, and there's very little on the other
side of the ledger. Of course, Democrats could blow it by nominating
another candidate with massive credibility issues.
For another piece on shifting political grounds, see:
Stanley B Greenberg: Trump Is Beginning to Lose His Grip.
Jim Acosta vs. the Trump White House, explained:
This particular weird incident with Acosta and the staffer might be
no more remembered than a dozen other bizarre moments from that press
conference. (Trump openly mocked losing House Republican candidates,
misstated the tipping point states in the Electoral College, threatened
politically motivated investigations of House Democrats, blamed "Obama's
regime" for Russian annexation of Crimea, claimed to be unable to
understand foreign journalists' accents, wildly mischaracterized both
DACA and the Affordable Care Act, and said some stuff about China that
was so incoherent, it's hard to even call it lying.)
Also note this:
But more broadly, to cast the press as the real "opposition party" in
America -- as Trump has -- offers some meaningful tactical advantages.
Trump, in an unusual way, won the 2016 presidential election without
being popular. Not only did he win fewer votes than Hillary Clinton on
Election Day, but his favorability rating was lower than that of the
losing candidates from the 2012, 2008, 2004, and 2000 presidential
elections.
The nonpartisan press can (and does) report facts that are unflattering
to Trump. But a lack of unflattering facts or a failure by the public to
appreciate their existence has never been the foundation of Trump's
political success. And the press isn't going to do the work of an actual
opposition party, which is to formulate a political alternative that an
adequate number of people find to be sufficiently inspiring to go out and
vote for.
That's the job of the Democratic Party, an institution that's had
considerable trouble attracting press attention to its own message and
ideas ever since Trump exploded on the scene. And keeping the media
focused on a self-referential feud between Trump and the media is a
way to maintain his preferred approach of trying to suck up all the
oxygen in the room.
Meanwhile, what matters to Trump isn't any actual crushing of the
media but simply driving the narrative in his core followers' heads
that the media is at war with him. With that pretense in place, critical
coverage and unflattering facts can be dismissed even as Trump selectively
courts the press to inject his own preferred ideas into the mainstream.
PS:
Aaron Rupar: Trump-appointed judge orders White House to temporarily
restore Acosta's credentials. "Even Fox News released a statement
siding with CNN."
Republicans just lost a Senate seat in Arizona because Trump is an
egomaniac.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slams Amazon's imminent arrival in Queens.
For a further critique, see:
Alexia Fernández Campbell: The US economy doesn't need more Amazon jobs.
It needs higher wages.
One chart that shows racism has everything and nothing to do with Republican
election wins: The chart shows a fairly strong correlation between
denial of racism and voting Republican. It's long been hard to get an
accurate survey of racism in America because much of what amounts to
racial prejudice is subconscious (or rarely conscious), and very few
people admit to being racists, even those who often act and/or talk
the part.
Michelle Alexander: The Newest Jim Crow: "Recent criminal justice
reforms contain the seeds of a frightening system of 'e-carceration.'"
Zack Beauchamp: What's going on with Brexit, explained in under 500
words: Or, in under 30 words: Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated
a "soft Brexit" deal that would retain UK access to Europe's common
market and an "open border" in Ireland. Nobody likes it. Also see:
John Cassidy: The Brexit Fantasy Goes Down in Tears; and
Jane Mayer: New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica's
Role in Brexit.
Tom Engelhardt: The Donald and the Fake News Media.
Kathy Gannon: After 17 years, many Afghans blame US for unending war.
Jeff Goodell: The President's Coal Warrior: All about EPA head
(and former coal industry lobbyist) Andrew Wheeler, and his "highly
effective campaign to sacrifice public health in favor of the
fossil-fuel industry."
Glenn Greenwald: As the Obama DOJ Concluded, Prosecution of Julian Assange
for Publishing Documents Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom.
Michael Grunwald: How Everything Became the Culture War: I guess this
is an important subject, but this could be treated better. One problem is
the meticulously balanced centrism:
At a time when Blue and Red America have split into two warring tribes
inhabiting two separate realities, and "debate" has been redefined to
evoke split-screen cable-news screamfests, this ferocious politicization
of everything might seem obvious and unavoidable. . . . Democrats and
Republicans are increasingly self-segregated and mutually disdainful,
each camp deploying the furious language of victimhood to justify its
fear and loathing of the gullible deplorables in the other.
This is followed by a list of caricatures, evenly sorted between two
camps, except that a strange asymmetry sets in: the terminology, not to
mention the ominous overtones, comes almost exclusively from the right.
For instance, there is nothing remotely like a Church of Global Warming
Leftists. It's not that leftists cannot play culture war games, but the
right uses them as proxies for policies never get aired out (like the
promise to "repeal and replace" ACA with something "better and cheaper").
The reason culture war has increasingly swamped political discourse is
that conservatives have little chance of convincing most Americans of
the merits of their program, so they try to manipulate what they hope
is a viable target base with appeals to their identity, and big lies
and massive shots of fear and loathing. It's gotten much worse in the
last couple years, but isn't that just Trump? I don't know whether he
tries to turn everything into culture war because he has some shrewd
insight into mass psychology or because he has no grasp of policy
whatsoever -- he certainly never manages to say anything intelligible
on whatever he's up to.
I think it's safe to say Obama was never like that, even as he was
subjected to repeated attempts to impugn his patriotism, his religion,
his honesty, his dignity. It's true that not every Republican took that
tack, but many did (not least Trump himself). I just ran across a meme
in my Facebook feed today that is possibly the most offensive one I've
seen: "The Obamas continue to linger, like the stench of human waste
that fouls the air and assaults the nostrils." The comments just build
on this.
Umair Irfan: Why the wildfire in Northern California was so severe:
"Heat, wind, and drought -- and long-term climate trends -- conspired
to create the deadly Camp Fire." Also:
Brian Resnick: Northern California now has the worst air quality in the
world, thanks to wildfire smoke; and
Gabriel Thompson: As Toxic Smoke Blankets California, Who Has the
Ability to Escape? Subhed ("while the wealthy can flee toward cleaner
air, the poorest have no choice but to stay put") isn't exactly true on
any count, not that the wealthy don't have more options. But the wealthy
also need to note that they're the ones who own most of the property
threatened by climate-driven disaster. Beachfront houses aren't owned
by poor people, nor are most of the houses destroyed in California towns
like Paradise and Malibu. Moreover, that "bad air" map covers a lot of
wealthy towns, and air is about the only thing rich and poor still share
alike. Maybe some ultra-rich folk hopped in their jets and went elsewhere,
but most middling property owners are as stuck as everyone else.
Paul Krugman: Why Was Trump's Tax Cut a Fizzle? No surprises here.
Just a review of the things Republicans say to get special favors for
their donors, and how quickly they are forgotten.
Last week's blue wave means that Donald Trump will go into the 2020
election with only one major legislative achievement: a big tax cut
for corporations and the wealthy. Still, that tax cut was supposed
to accomplish big things. Republicans thought it would give them a
big electoral boost, and they predicted dramatic economic gains. What
they got instead, however, was a big fizzle.
The political payoff, of course, never arrived. And the economic
results have been disappointing. True, we've had two quarters of
fairly fast economic growth, but such growth spurts are fairly common --
there was a substantially bigger spurt in 2014, and hardly anyone
noticed. And this growth was driven largely by consumer spending
and, surprise, government spending, which wasn't what the tax cutters
promised.
Meanwhile, there's no sign of the vast investment boom the law's
backers promised. Corporations have used the tax cut's proceeds largely
to buy back their own stock rather than to add jobs and expand capacity.
Also by Krugman:
The Tax Cut and the Balance of Payments (Wonkish). Also:
Jim Tankersley/Matt Phillips: Trump's Tax Cut Was Supposed to Change
Corporate Behavior. Here's What Happened.
Caroline Orr: US joins Russia, North Korea in refusing to sign cybersecurity
pact: This may not be the right deal -- one major plank is to protect
"intellectual property" which often is meant to force an arbitrary division
of the world into owners and renters -- but some sort of effort like this
should be negotiated, and it needs to include Russia and the US, simply
because those (along with China and Israel) are the nations with the worst
track record of waging cyberwar. Take away the idea of cyberwar, and you
could even start to crack down on everyday nuisance hacking, which would
make all of our lives easier.
Sarah Smarsh: A Blue Wave in Kansas? Don't Be So Surprised: The
only state which has elected three female governors, all Democrats
(also a female three-term Senator, Republican Nancy Kassebaum).
Michael Robbins: Looking Busy: The Rise of Pointless Work: A review
of David Graeber's latest book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.
Matt Taibbi: Trump's Defense Spending Is Out of Control, and Poised to
Get Worse:
Sabrina Tavernise: These Americans Are Done With Politics: "The
Exhausted Majority needs a break."
A deep new study of the American electorate, "Hidden Tribes," concludes
that two out of three Americans are far more practical than that narrative
suggests. Most do not see their lives through a political lens, and when
they have political views the views are far less rigid than those of the
highly politically engaged, ideologically orthodox tribes.
The study, an effort to understand the forces that drive political
polarization, surveyed a representative group of 8,000 Americans. The
nonpartisan organization that did it, More in Common, paints a picture
of a society that is far more disengaged -- and despairing over divisions --
than it is divided. At its heart is a vast and often overlooked political
middle that feels forgotten in the vitriol, as if the country has gone on
without it. It calls that group the Exhausted Majority, a group that
represented two-thirds of the survey.
"It feels very lonely out here," said Jamie McDaniel, a 36-year-old
home health care worker in Topeka, Kan., one of several people in the
study who was interviewed for this article. "Everybody is so right or
left, and you're just kind of standing there in the middle saying,
"What happened?'"
Rachel Withers: CIA reportedly concludes that Jamal Khashoggi was killed
on the Saudi crown prince's orders. Also:
Alex Ward: Trump doesn't want to punish Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi. His
new sanctions prove it. I don't doubt Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's
culpability here, even with the CIA attesting to it, but I also don't think
the US should be unilaterally sanctioning Saudi Arabia or its citizens,
except perhaps through an international process, perhaps based on the World
Court or the International Criminal Court. On the other hand, the US does
need to rethink its relationship to Saudi Arabia. The US should cut off
all arms sales and support as long as Saudi Arabia is engaged in its war
of aggression against Yemen. The US should also stop catering to Saudi
hostility against Iran and seek to negotiate deals that would allow Iran
to enjoy normal, mutually beneficial relationships with the US and its
various neighbors. But the idea that the US should act as judge and jury
in deciding to punish other states and people is arrogant and unfair, a
force of injustice and destabilization which ultimately does more harm
than good.
Speaking of Saudi Arabia and the mischief MBS is up to:
David Hearst: Bin Salman 'tried to persuade Netanyahu to go to war in
Gaza' say sources. Note that Israel in fact launched a series of
attacks on Gaza
starting on November 11; also see
Alex Ward: Israel and Gaza just saw their worst violence in years. It
could get worse.
Rachel Withers: Weekend midterms update: Democrats concede Florida and
Georgia but complete their Orange County sweep: "Plus, where the
rest of the outstanding races stand." For an earlier rundown, see:
All the House seats Democrats have flipped in the 2018 elections.
Withers also wrote:
Trump skipped Arlington Cemetery on Veterans Day because he was "extremely
busy"; and
Trump attacks retired Navy SEAL Admiral Bill McRaven, suggests he
should have gotten bin Laden sooner.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Weekend Roundup
When I went to bed around 5AM after Tuesday's elections, the Democrats
had won the House and beat Kris Kobach here in Kansas, but it seemed like
a lot of close elections had broke bad. I heard Wednesday that a couple
elections had flipped: Ned Lamont picked up the CT governorship, and more
importantly, Scott Walker lost in Wisconsin. Tester pulled out his Senate
seat in Montana. Nevada had looked promising on Tuesday, and firmed up,
while Arizona got close, and even started to lean toward Democrat Krysten
Sinema. Florida tightened up.
Still, could (should) have been better. Compared to 2014 and 2018, the
Democrats did much better on several counts: they ran better candidates
and contested more seats; and they did a better job of getting out their
vote. Trump didn't get a popular opinion honeymoon after he took office.
He was deeply offensive to most Democrats from the start, and everything
he did prodded them to resist more fervently. That's what motivated people
to run, to campaign, to organize, and ultimately to vote, and often to
win -- although even some of the losses, like Beto O'Rourke in Texas, or
Stacey Abrams in Georgia, were close enough they seemed like progress.
On the other hand, Trump and the Republicans haven't lost much ground.
They've done a lot of things that in themselves are very unpopular --
the big corporate tax cut, for instance, and they dodged blame for ACA
repeal only by failing to pass it -- but their base has held firm, they
still have a lot of money, a strong captive media, and a very effective
ground game. Of course, it helped that the economy hasn't capsized yet,
that their reckless foreign policy hasn't led to major wars, that their
corporate deregulation hasn't produced major disasters yet, and that
only a few of their corrupt minions have been convicted or indicted.
On the other hand, their global warming denialism is beginning to wear
thin with major hurricanes and an unprecedentedly horrific fire season.
Branch Rickey used to say that luck is the residue of design. Trump's
political designs are so faulty that it's unlikely his luck will hold.
On the other hand, he did something in 2018 that Obama had failed to
do in 2014 and 2010, which is that he campaigned relentlessly for his
party in the months and weeks leading up to the election -- indeed, he
never really stopped campaigning after 2016. He hasn't been all that
effective, mostly because he isn't really very popular, but he did keep
his base enthused, and (unlike in 2006, when everyone was sick and tired
of Bush and Cheney) he got his base out to vote. It's going to take a
lot of hard work to get enough people to realize how harmful Republicans
are to most people's interests. And expect a lot of noise and distraction
from Fox and friends along the way: the "caravan" story was as good an
example of truly fake news as you can imagine. Hard to say whether how
much it helped Republicans, but it sucked a lot of air from broadcast
news during the last few weeks.
Democracy took a step forward last Tuesday. A small one. Hopefully
the first of many.
Quick election results recap:
US Senate: Republicans gained two seats, for a 51-46 edge, with
3 undecided: Mississippi (runoff, R favored), Florida (R +13k), Arizona
(D +33k [since I wrote this called for the Democrat]), so it will probably
wind up 53-47 (counting Sanders and King
with the Democrats). Only one-third of the Senate's seats are up for
election each two years, and this year the Democrats were much more
vulnerable (after exceptionally strong showings in 2006 and 2012). To
put the net losses of 2-4 seats in perspective, Democrats won (counting
AZ but not FL/MS) 24 seats to the Republicans' 10. Democrats won 57.4%
of the Senate vote, vs. 41.0% for Republicans. This split was inflated
because both of California's "top two" primary winners are Democrats.
All four (counting FL) Republican pickups were in states Trump won --
3 by 10+ points, 2 against Democrats who won in 2012 after Republicans
nominated especially controversial "Tea Party" candidates. On the other
hand, Democrats won 7 Senate seats (counting AZ) in states carried by
Trump, plus defeated a Republican incumbent in a state Trump lost (NV).
US House of Representatives: Democrats gained 32 seats, with 10
still undecided, for a current 227-198 advantage. Democrats received
51.4% of the popular vote, vs. 46.7% for Republicans, for a margin of
4.7%.
Governors: Democrats gained 7, giving them 23; Republicans lost
6 (assuming FL and GA go Republican; the difference is that Republicans
picked up previously independent Alaska). Popular vote favored Democrats
49.4-48.2%, as state races were less polarized than Congressional ones
(e.g., Republicans won easily in MA, MD, and VT). Democrats gained: ME,
MI, WI, IL, KS, NM, and NV. Republicans gained AK.
538: What Went Down in the 2018 Midterms: Live blog until they got
tired and signed off.
538: The 2018 Midterms, in 4 Charts.
Some scattered links this week:
Matthew Yglesias: Trump voters stood by Trump in the midterms -- but there
just aren't enough of them: Trump was elected president in 2016 with
just 46% of the vote. Republicans got about the same 46% of the vote in
the 2018 congressional elections, so a cursory analysis suggests that they
held their own, while everyone else (including independent voters for Jill
Stein and Gary Johnson) joined the Democrats. Probably not that simple:
Republicans did better than 46% in 2016 congressional races, so they lost
that edge this year. In particular, they lost ground in the Rust Belt and
in the Latino Belt from Texas through Arizona and Nevada to California,
while they hung on more effectively in a swath from Florida up to Idaho.
Other Yglesias pieces:
The 2018 electorate was older, whiter, and better educated than in
2016: "Democrats hit some of their GOTV targets but missed others."
OK, but isn't the relevant comparison 2014 to 2018? Turnout was up
for a midterm (2018 and 2014), but down from the presidential election
(2016). From 2016 to 2018, 18-39 turnout was -7,but from 2014 to 2018,
it was +4. White was +2 vs. 2016, but -3 vs. 2014.
Matthew Whitaker's appointment is the latest Trump Tax the GOP is paying:
"A nominee whose only qualification is his unfitness."
Matthew Whitaker is, by any standard, a wildly unsuitable choice to serve
as Attorney General of the United States.
He's a small time crook who finished fourth in the Iowa GOP Senate
primary back in 2014. He apparently got his job as Chief of Staff in the
Justice Department because Trump liked his TV hits, experience that would
at best qualify him to one the DOJ's chief spokesperson not to be chief
of staff and certainly not to run the Justice Department. Meanwhile,
Kellyanne Conway's husband, a prominent Washington attorney, says
Whitaker's appointment is illegal.
The point, however, is that in a normal administration the question
of legality would simply never arise here. The Justice Department is full
of competent, professional, Senate-confirmed officials who would be more
suitable than Whitaker on both substance and procedural grounds. It's
commonplace in liberal circles to see Whitaker as an inappropriate
selection in light of his previous comments about Robert Mueller's
investigation, but the truth is the Mueller issue is his only conceivable
qualification for the job. Trump's problem with the senior staff at the
Justice Department is he has no way of knowing whether or not they share
with Jeff Sessions and Ron Rosenstein a reluctance to fatally compromise
the rule of law in pursuit of Trump's personal self-interest.
House Democrats must resist Trump's infrastructure trap.
House Democrats must resist Trump's infrastructure trap.
The tragedy of Amazon's HQ2 selections, explained: After announcing
they'd like to auction off the location of a second headquarters site,
they've evidently settled on two winners: one in Virginia's DC suburbs,
the other in Long Island City, Queens, New York. Lots of problems.
Matt Whitaker suggested the attorney general might keep Robert Mueller's
conclusions secret forever.
Debbie Stabenow reelected to the Senate.
Ned Lamont elected governor of Connecticut.
Trump's bizarre post-election press conference, explained.
But shocking as it was in its way, it confirmed what we know about Trump.
He is shameless, relentlessly dishonest, poorly informed about policy,
disrespectful of the norms and principles of constitutional government,
and fundamentally dangerous. He also continues to benefit from a benign
economic situation and from a lack of crises abroad that make a serious
impact on the typical American. For all of our sakes, we'd better hope
that holds up because he does not appear to have the capacity to respond
in a remotely appropriate way to any kind of adversity. . . .
The price of this sort of conduct has already been high. An island
destroyed, a wave of Trump-inspired bombings, a needless destabilization
of relations with key allies, and a growing diminution of the standards
of conduct that we accept for public officials. But for most Americans,
day-to-day life has proceeded apace and that's put a floor under Trump's
approval ratings that's been good enough to keep the whole Republican
Party afloat given gerrymandering and a skewed Senate map. Losing the
House would be a wake-up call for a normal president, but there is no
waking up Trump -- only the hope that nothing goes too badly wrong while
he lasts in office.
Tammy Baldwin reelected to US Senate: a progressive champion wins in
Wisconsin.
Sherrod Brown reelected to US Senate: old-time labor liberalism triumphs
over Ohio's rightward drift.
Why Stacey Abrams isn't conceding yet.
4 winners and 2 losers from the 2018 midterm elections: Winners:
"the favored quarter backlash"; Donald Trump; "the blue wall"; gerrymandering.
Losers: Taylor Swift; "the live models." The explanation on Trump:
And while losing the House is the death knell for the Republican Party's
legislative agenda, Trump himself has rarely seemed to care that much
about the GOP legislative agenda. Indeed, the death of the GOP legislative
agenda could even be good news for Trump politically since much of that
agenda was toxically unpopular. An expanded majority in the Senate,
meanwhile, will let Trump do things he actually cares about, like replace
Cabinet members and other executive branch officials who've displeased
him, while continuing to keep the judicial confirmation conveyor belt
that's so important to his base moving.
The lesson of the midterms: resistance works.
Radley Balko: Jeff Sessions, the doughty bigot:
Jeff Sessions's final act as attorney general was perfectly on-brand.
On the way out of office, he signed an order making it more difficult
for the Justice Department to investigate and implement reform at police
departments with patterns of abuse, questionable shootings, racism, and
other constitutional violations. Sessions once called such investigations --
like those that turned up jaw-dropping abuses in places such as Ferguson,
Mo., Baltimore and Chicago -- "one of the most dangerous, and rarely
discussed, exercises of raw power." He has had only cursory criticism of
the horrific abuses actually described in those reports (which he later
conceded he sometimes didn't bother to read), which disproportionately
affect blacks and Latinos. For Sessions, it is the federal government's
investigation of such abuses that amounts to not just an unjustified
"exercise of raw power," but a "most dangerous" one.
Bob Bauer: An Open-and-Shut Violation of Campaign-Finance Law.
Jonathan Blitzer: Jeff Sessions Is Out, but His Dark Vision for Immigration
Policy Lives On.
James Carroll: Entering the Second Nuclear Age?: With his withdrawal
from the INF treaty with Russia, and with big plans to renovate and rebuild
America's nuclear arsenal, "Donald Trump welcomes the age of "usable" nuclear
weapons." Also at
TomDispatch:
Michael Klare: On the Road to World War III?.
William Hartung: The pentagon's Plan to Dominate the Economy:
Industrial policy should not be a dirty word. The problem is: the
Pentagon shouldn't be in charge of it. The goal of an effective
industrial policy should be to create well-paying jobs, especially
in sectors that meet pressing national needs like rebuilding America's
crumbling infrastructure and developing alternative energy technologies
that can help address the urgent dangers posed by climate change.
Tom Engelhardt: Autocrats, Incorporation: Thoughts on Election Day 2018.
Arnold Isaacs: Misremembering Vietnam: Alt title: "Making America's
Wars Great Again: The Pentagon Whitewashes a Troubling Past."
The cliché that our armed forces are the best and mightiest in the world --
even if the U.S. military hasn't won any of its significant wars in the
last 50 years -- resonates in President Trump's promise to make America
great again. Many Americans, clearly including him, associate that slogan
with military power. And we don't just want to be greater again in the
future; we also want to have been greater in the past than we really were.
To that end, we regularly forget some facts and invent others that will
make our history more comfortable to remember.
Rory Fanning: Will the War Stories Ever End? Author of a book of his
own war stories, Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger's Journey Out of
the Military and Across America (2014, Haymarket Books).
Maureen Dowd: Who's the Real American Psycho? A look back at Dick
Cheney, occasioned by the screening of a new movie called Vice.
As for the "psycho" question, such things take time and perspective.
If you got sick eight years ago and got sick again now, you won't be
able to make meaningful comparisons until (and if) you survive and
recover. Between Trump ("a frothing maniac with a meat cleaver") and
Cheney ("a professional assassin") the latter may still in theory be
the more menacing, but the threat right now is so immediate and so
open-ended that it's the one you have to deal with right now. Dowd,
by the way, also recently wrote this clever piece on Saudi Arabia:
Step Away From the Orb:
Our Faustian deal was this: As long as the Saudis kept our oil prices
low, bought our fighter jets, housed our fleets and drones and gave us
cover in the region, they could keep their country proudly medieval.
It was accepted wisdom that it was futile to press the Saudis on the
feudal, the degradation of women and human rights atrocities, because it
would just make them dig in their heels. Even Hillary Clinton, as secretary
of state, never made an impassioned Beijing-style speech about women in
Saudi Arabia being obliterated under a black tarp.
Atul Gawande: Why Doctors Hate Their Computers: Fairly long piece on
computerized medical records, which should be great to have but are a lot
of work to maintain, and the slacker and sloppier you get about that, the
less great they are. First point I take from this is that there is a lot
of real work to be done to make the health care system work better beyond
the obvious advantages of single-payer insurance -- something that tends
to be forgotten in that argument. Gawande identifies several problems with
the software, ranging from its impact on focus and communication to the
increasing brittleness of sprawing code systems. One thing worth exploring
is how open source might help, but you also have to look at how to finance
development and support. Another dimension is the increasing use of AI. I
believe that the only way to build trust in complex software is through
open source, but what's needed can't be developed as a free hacker hobby.
Masha Gessen: After the White House Banned Jim Acosta, Should Other Journalists
Boycott Its Press Briefings? Also:
Margaret Sullivan: Words and walkouts aren't enough> CNN should sue Trump
over revoking Acosta's press pass.
Adam Hochschild: A Hundred Years After the Armistice: Due to the world's
fascination with round numbers, I'm reminded that our Nov. 11 Veterans Day
originally started as Armistice Day, marking the end of what was then called
the Great War but was soon eclipsed, now better known as World War I. A date
that should remind all how precious peace is has since become a celebration
of American militarism, as we thank the hapless soldiers and gloss over the
politicians who put them in harm's way. One could write reams about that war,
and indeed its centennary has brought dozens of new books out. Hochschild
wrote one I read back in 2011: To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and
Rebellion, 1914-1918, which focused on anti-war resisters in Britain
(like Bertrand Russell -- as close to a hero as I ever had). The tag line
on this piece is: "If you think the First World War began senselessly,
consider how it ended." He recounts several stories of how allied generals
(especially Americans, notably including white commanders of negro troops)
continued to launch offensives after the armistice was agreed to up to
the moment (11AM) it was to take effect, resulting in thousands of
avoidable casualties. He also notes, in less depth, the insistence of
French general Foch on making the armistice as punitive as possible,
leaving a "toxic legacy" that lead to a second world war. Many more
books have been written about the post-armistice Versailles Treaty,
like Arno Mayer's massive Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking,
but the best title to date is David Fromkin's A Peace to End All
Peace. The excessively punitive Versailles Treaty is now widely
acknowledge as a cause of WWII. (Arno Mayer has referred to the two
World Wars as 30 Years War of the Twentieth Century.) More important
in my mind is that Versailles failed to repudiate imperialism. In fact,
Britain, France, Italy, and Japan extended their empires through war,
especially whetting the appetites of the latter, while leaving Germany
and others convinced that they needed to enlarge themselves to compete
with the rich nations. By the way,
Josh Marshall recommends The Vanquished: Why the First World
War Failed to End.
Another interesting piece on the war:
Patrick Chovanec: World War I Relived Day by Day.
Fred Kaplan: Could House Democrats Cancel the Pentagon's Blank Check?
Perhaps, but it would take uncommon discipline, given that more than a
few Democrats are deficit hawks and/or Pentagon Keynesians. Given narrow
margins (and the absence of anything like the "Hastert Rule" for Democrats),
Republicans could try to forge opportunistic alliances with either group.
One thing for sure is that House Democrats won't be able to raise taxes,
so there's very little they can do about deficits. On the other hand,
spending bills originate in the House, so with a little discipline they
can keep important programs funded and cut useless and even damaging
ones. But, as I said, that's not something they've ever been much good
at.
Kaplan also wrote:
Trump Retreats From the West: "The president's performance in Paris
was a stunning abdication of global leadership." That sounds like good
news to me -- not to deny that Trump did it pretty ugly. Maybe Trump
was peeved at this:
Macron denounces nationalism as a 'betrayal of patriotism' in rebuke
to Trump at WWI remembrance. Then,
Trump skipped a US cemetery visit abroad. The French army trolled him for
avoiding the rain. But the fact is, Trump's "America First" fetish
doesn't leave him much to offer the rest of the world -- where, as in
everyday life, generosity is appreciated and peevishness scorned. On the
other hand, for many years now US administrations have done little that
actually helps either people abroad or at home that we'd all be better
off if the US (especially its military) would back away. For more on
Trump's Paris trip, see
Jen Kirby: The controversies of Trump's Paris trip, explained.
Paul Krugman: What the Hell Happened to Brazil? (Wonkish): "How did
an up-and-coming economy suffer such a severe slump?"
Robert Kuttner: The Crash That Failed: Review of the latest big book
on the 2008 financial collapse, the "great recession" that followed, and
various government efforts to clean up the mess: Adam Tooze's Crashed:
How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. Interesting
sidelight of an illustration:
William Powhida: Griftopia, based on Matt Taibbi's book.
Dara Lind: The asylum ban -- Trump's boldest immigration power grab yet --
explained.
Mark Mazzetti/Ronen Bergman/David D Kirkpatrick: Saudis Close to Crown
Prince Discussed Killing Other Enemies a Year Before Khashoggi's Death.
Bill McKibben: A Very Grim Forecast: On Global Warming of 1.5°C: An
IPCC Special Report.
Yascha Mounk: Is More Democracy Always Better Democracy? Noted for
future reference, no agreement implied. Author of a recent centrist
manifesto: The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger &
How to Save It. Reviews Frances McCall Rosenbluth: Responsible
Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself (2018) -- arguing: "the
most important ingredient of a functioning democracy . . . is strong
political parties that can keep their rank-and-file members in check" --
and looks back to Marty Cohen/David Karol/Hans Noel/John Zaller: The
Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform
(2008). Mounk's prime example of "too much democracy" was the 1972
nomination and loss of George McGovern, although for a token example
Republican he cites Mark Sanford's primary loss to a Trump zealot (who
last week lost Sanford's SC district). The main problem with Mounk's
thesis is that organizations which lack effective democratic oversight
almost inevitably wind up putting their leaders' elite interests ahead
of their voters. At least with McGovern's Democratic Party reforms,
the party was able to nominate a presidential candidate who reflected
the majority view among rank-and-file Democrats to quit the Vietnam
War. That sounds more to me like an example of democracy working --
especially more than 2016, when the party elites prevailed in picking
a candidate who was even more unpopular. (Sure, Hillary Clinton polled
better than McGovern, but consider her opponent.) As for the Republicans,
you can fault their rank-and-file for favoring someone as odious as
Donald Trump, but at least the limited democracy Republicans practice
saved them from the party elites nominating Jeb Bush.
Rachel Withers: Trump responds to worst fires in California's history
by threatening to withhold federal aid. Also on the fires:
Robinson Meyer: The Worst Is Yet to Come for California's Wildfires; also
Umair Irfan: California's wildfires are hardly "natural" -- humans made
them worse at every step.
Benjamin Wittes: It's Probably Too Late to Stop Mueller: The
morning after the election, Trump fired Attorney General Jeff
Sessions and installed Matthew Whitaker as acting AG, making it
easier for Trump to terminate Robert Mueller's prosecution of
Trump-Russia issues. Wittes takes stock:
Eighteen months ago, I said, President Donald Trump had an opportunity
to disrupt the Russia investigation: He had fired the FBI director and
had rocked the Justice Department back on its heels. But Trump had
dithered. He had broadcast his intentions too many times. And in the
meantime, Mueller had moved decisively, securing important indictments
and convictions, and making whatever preparations were necessary for
hostile fire. And now Democrats were poised to take the House of
Representatives. The window of opportunity was gone.
In the 48 hours since Trump fired Jeff Sessions and installed Matthew
Whitaker as acting attorney general, I have had occasion to wonder whether
I was being overly optimistic a week ago. Whitaker is the kind of bad
dream from which career Justice Department officials wake up at night in
cold sweats. He's openly political. The president is confident in his
loyalty and that he won't recuse himself from the investigation --
notwithstanding his public statements about it and his having chaired the
campaign of one of the grand-jury witnesses. There are legal questions
about his installation at the department's helm. And he's known as the
White House's eyes and ears at Justice.
By the way:
Jerome Corsi says Mueller will soon indict him for perjury.
Finally, some more election-related links:
Alleen Brown: Pipeline Opponents Make Gains in Midterms as Federal Judge
Halts Keystone XL Pipeline.
John Cassidy: Weekend Reading: From the Midterms to Matthew Whitaker
and Stormy Daniels; he also wrote:
Make No Mistake, the Midterm Elections Were a Democratic Victory and a
Rebuke of Trump..
Rachel M Cohen: Progressives Win on Medicaid Expansion, Public Education,
and Voting Rights Through Ballot Initiatives.
David Dayen: Democrats Who Voted to Deregulate Wall Street Got Wiped Out
in a Setback for Bank Lobbyists.
Andrew Gelman: Why the 2018 Midterms May Have Been Bluer Than You
Think.
David A Graham: Why Trump Is the Favorite in 2020.
Shaun King: Why It's a Big Deal That Four Black Candidates Won Their
State Attorney General Races: In Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, and
New York.
Paul Krugman: Real America Versus Senate America: "Some of us are more
equal than others, and they like Trump."
Aaron Mak: A Black Security Guard Caught a Shooting Suspect. Police Arrived --
and Killed the Guard.
Jane Mayer: Is Kris Kobach's Defeat in Kansas a Model for How to Beat
Trumpism? Not really. First point is that Kobach was a really awful
candidate, to the point that he was a public embarrassment, and quite
a few Republicans realized that he would continue to hurt the party as
long as he held office. (The list of Republicans who endorsed Kelly ran
over 100.) Second point is that Kelly campaigned almost exclusively
against the Brownback legacy in the state, whereas Kobach hung his
campaign almost exclusively on Trump's coattails. Personally, I thought
Kelly missed an opportunity there as Kobach is objectively worse than
Brownback ever was, but she clearly didn't want to campaign against
Trump in Kansas, and in the end she didn't have to. The downside of
not lumping all of the Republicans together is that she had almost no
coattails: the Democrats picked up one House seat, but they won no
other state offices (despite having a strong Secretary of State
candidate running for Kobach's old office). The state house is still
solid Republican, and Kelly won't be able to legislate anything that
the R's don't go for (she'll even have trouble sustaining vetoes).
Not that we aren't happy with her win (and his loss, but he'll still
be around, winding up with a Trump Admin job somewhere, and then go
on do bad movement law work, even after he gets debarred.) Democrats
can't depend on R's nominating candidates as inept and obscene as
Kobach (although Trump is in that league). And Democrats have a lot
of work to do to become a majority party here.
Cas Mudde: Don't be fooled. The midterms were not a bad night for
Trump. Key line: "Trump's biggest victory, however, was within
the Republican party. . . . Trump has shaped the Republican party
in his image instead."
Alex Pareene: Political power never lasts. Democrats need to use theirs
while they have it.
Steve Phillips: Do the Math. Moderate Democrats Will Not Win in 2020.
Author of a book, Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution
Has Created a New American Majority -- somewhat premature, as shown
by his focus on candidates who came close but (evidently) lost: Andrew
Gillum, Stacey Abrams, Beto O'Rourke.
Andrew Romano: Want to Beat Trump in 2020? Look at Sherrod Brown's
Big Win in Ohio.
Jennifer Rubin: What Democrats' big win in Arizona means. Rubin
also wrote:
Trump is cracking. I do take exception to Rubin's complaint about
Trump's "great North Korea diplomacy . . . (He was snookered.)" I don't
have time to track down the many things wrong with the NY Times piece
that claims North Korea has reneged on their promises to Trump, but
the real problem there is that Trump's has allowed people like John
Bolton to set requirements and expectations meant to sabotage any sort
of resolution.
Amy Davidson Sorkin: The Post-Midterms Dangers of Donald Trump. She
also wrote:
Donald Trump's Final, Bitter Rallies.
Jon Schwarz: Democrats Should Remember Al Gore Won Florida in 2000 -- but
Lost the Presidency With a Preemptive Surrender.
Nate Silver: The 2018 Map Looked a Lot Like 2012 . . . and That Got Me
Thinking About 2020.
Kay Steiger, et al.: The Arizona, Florida, and Georgia election recounts,
explained: Two Senate races: in Arizona, the Democrat is ahead by
21,000 votes (according to this article, but the
NY Times is now reporting a Democratic lead of almost 33,000); in
Florida, the Republican by 13,000.
Two Governors races: in Florida, the Republican leads by 34,000, and in
Georgia the Republican by 63,000, but a runoff election could be mandated
if the recount drops the Republican to under 50%.
Matt Taibbi: Forget 'Conventional Wisdom': There Are No More Moderates:
I share his reluctance to cater to self-appointed centrists who insist
that Democrats have to show their moderation by adopting positions that
can only be described as "Republican-lite," but the fact is that even
the "democratic wing of the Democratic Party" are pretty damn moderate
in their wildest dreams (universal health care, free public education,
world peace, civil rights, voting rights, labor unions, basically things
that most of the economically advanced world take for granted). Also by
Taibbi:
Bernie Sanders Opens Up About New Democrats in Congress, Taking on
Trumpism, and
Far Too Many House Seats Have Been Uncontested for Too Long.
Ruy Teixeira: The midterms gave Democrats clear marching orders for
2020.
Matthew Zeitlin: Trump Has Something New to Blame for a Sluggish Stock
Market: "Presidential Harassment": There's always an explanation
that doesn't involve reality.
Li Zhou: Kyrsten Sinema is the first Democrat to win an Arizona Senate
seat in 30 years.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
prev -- next
|
