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Weekend Roundup [130 - 139]

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Once again, a week with too damn much to report, and too little time to collect it all. Nothing on elections in Iraq (last week) or Venezuela (coming soon; US media already bitching like crazy over Maduro stealing the election and driving the "once prosperous" country ever deeper into ruin). Nothing on primaries in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, nor on prospects for November. A little bit on Korea, written before the US backed down and called off the war games that threatened to derail the talks. Fred Kaplan notes: One Month Before His Summit With Trump, Kim Jong-un Is the One Calling the Shots. (Considering John Bolton and Donald Trump as alternatives, that's really not such bad news.) Just a wee bit on the Mueller "witch hunt." Didn't even get around to the book I'm reading.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that you shouldn't miss this week, explained: Gina Haspel is America's new director of the CIA (six Democrats supported Haspel, who ran Bush-era torture programs, while two Republicans opposed, with McCain absent); Net neutrality won a vote in the Senate (52-47 to overrule the FCC, although the House is unlikely to concur); The North Korea summit is suddenly in trouble (Yglesias doesn't mention continuing US war games that North Korea objects to, but does note that John Bolton keeps insisting on things that North Korea is unlikely to ever agree to); There's an Ebola outbreak in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo):

  But if things get bad, the United States, traditionally a world leader in epidemic response, has greatly diminished capacity in this regard. . . . Inconveniently, the head of the National Security Council's global health security efforts abruptly left earlier this month as part of a Bolton-inspired shake-up. His whole team has been dismantled, and budget cuts have already forced US public health agencies to scale back their international work.

  Other Yglesias links:

  • It might take a black candidate to beat Trump's toxic racial politics: "Cory Booker's path out of the identity vs. economic politics quagmire. . . . Booker's solution is essentially the one Obama offered -- reassure voters of color by putting one of their own in charge, and then let the politician spend his time making his case to the white voters." I've long regarded Booker as a crony of Wall Street, so even if he does make the case while campaigning I have little hope that he won't revert to form in office. As with Obama, that doesn't strike me as a long-term winning formula, which is what the Democrats really need. For what it's worth, I think the class vs. identity debate within the Democratic Party is muddled and confused.

  • 4 winners and 3 losers from the primaries in Pennsylvania and Nebraska: Winners: Pittsburgh-area socialism, Democratic women, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, tattoos. Losers: Rick Saccone, Oregon, DCCC (although I don't get the slam against Oregon).

  • Trump helps sanctioned Chinese phone maker after China delivers a big loan to a Trump project: I'm not a fan of US sanctions against Iran and North Korea -- they're meant to buttress a harsh and vindictive foreign policy, and they depend on imperious overreach by the US government into foreign commerce. Still, it's viciously amusing to see Trump all wound up about lost jobs in China, especially since the obvious explanation is old fashioned graft.

  • Cruelty is the defining characteristic of Donald Trump's politics and policy: "John Kelly says separating kids from their parents is fine because of 'foster care or whatever'." But that's just one example.

    From new Medicaid rules that hurt people with disabilities to rewriting bank regulations to favor predatory lenders to siding with Dow Chemical's lobbyists over pediatricians to keep allowing the manufacture of a pesticide that poisons children's brains, the circle of people who are subject to harm by a regime that practices the law of the jungle is ever widening.

    Very few of us are as rich or powerful as Trump, his Cabinet, his circle of friends and family, or his major campaign contributors. All of us will lose out from an ethic that licenses the strong to oppress the weak. Foreign-born children are uniquely disempowered in the political system, so they bear the brunt for now. But almost all of us will need help or protection at some point.

    Also see Masha Gessen: Taking Children From Their Parents Is a Form of State Terror.

  • Why are we taking Donald Trump's Korea diplomacy seriously? "All he does is lie and break promises. This will be no different." Sure, but why be so pessimistic about it? Yglesias sounds like he buys the whole argument that it's all North Korea's fault that we don't get along swimmingly with them -- even going so far as to buy the argument that acknowledging their existence by merely meeting is some kind of huge concession. The fact is that whatever deal emerges will almost completely be shaped by the two Koreas, and the planets seem better aligned than usual for such an agreement. In this context, Trump may have an advantage over past US presidents: ignorance, inattention to detail, a weak understanding of America's imperial posture, and an eagerness to claim credit for things he did nothing to make happen. He also has some advisers who realize that the US has no good options with North Korea -- not least because the US has painted itself into a corner by insisting on denuclearizing North Korea without having any way to force the issue. (Ever escalating cycles of sanctions are a nuisance for North Korea, but they don't threaten the survival of the regime; moreover, they underscore how hostile the US is, and how important it is that North Korea have a nuclear deterrent against US aggression.) Admittedly, Trump has some aides like John Bolton who are prefer the use of military force, but the people who actually run the DOD harbor no delusions that such an attack could be launched at a tolerable cost. So if the Koreas present him with a fait accompli, would he really screw it just to humor Bolton? I wouldn't put it past him: hiring Bolton and withdrawing from the Iran deal certainly seem to be a secret desire for failure. But even as the smart money bets on Trump doing something stupid, I don't see any reason to cheer him on.

• Zeeshan Aleem: Trump missed Congress's deadline for getting a NAFTA deal done. Now what? Not much, unless Trump decides to blow the whole existing deal up, which would, well, nobody knows what that would do. One thing it wouldn't do is restore pre-NAFTA jobs and demographics. This is partly because businesses that have been taking advantage of the arrangement for 25 years now aren't likely to roll over (or lose influence in all three countries), but also the pact's many losers (in all three countries) have moved on (or been trampled under). Any new deal will generate new winners and losers, so everyone advising the process have their own angles. As for Ryan's "deadline," that assumes Trump will come up with a Republican-favored deal, but the GOP is likely to be as divided as Democrats on any such change.

• Zack Beauchamp: Santa Fe High: Texas lieutenant governor blames shooting on "too many entrances": "too many exits" too: "There aren't enough people to put a guard at every entry and exit." It's not clear to me that shootings have anything to do with entries/exits, but one real threat that you'd like to have more exits for is fire. Maybe fires are rarer these days than shootings, but they do happen, and they are things that school administrators properly worry about.

  There are a number of practical problems with this idea. If you have a mass shooter in the building, you don't want to trap people in the building. It's not obvious that security guards would be able to spot someone concealing a weapon even if they were at every door; in fact, there were two armed guards at Santa Fe on Friday. And closing most of the entryways to a school would create a serious fire hazard.

  More fundamentally, this all feels like an absurd kind of deflection.

• Caleb Crain: Is Capitalism a Threat to Democracy? Basically, a review of Robert Kuttner's new book, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? -- although he starts off with a long disquisition on Karl Polanyi and his 1944 book The Great Transformation ("as the world was coming to terms with the destruction that fascism had wrought"). For another review, see Justin Fox: How Rampant Globalization Brought Us Trump. One thing I've noticed is how reviewers tend to drop the key word "Global" from the title. Kuttner doesn't have a problem with the well-regulated mixed economies of Western Europe and America from the 1940s through the 1960s: they combined strong growth rates with broad distribution of wealth. Rather, he blames the political rise of global finance since the 1970s, by the 1990s capturing center-left parties (e.g., Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK), ultimately discrediting the left such that populist resentment often wound up falling for the far right.

• Sean Illing: How TV trivialized our culture and politics: Interview with Lance Strate, author of Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World, as a surrogate for late media critic Neil Postman, most famous for his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985). Seems like I bought but never read that book -- or maybe I'm thinking of his 1992 book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, by which time Postman was turning into something of a neo-luddite. The context for Amusing, of course, was Ronald Reagan, an actor who played the role of president, but unlike Trump today, Reagan at least tried to act presidential, since that's what the role expected. Trump lacks Reagan's craft and discipline as an actor, or even as a human being. Rather, taking Postman's title to its absurd conclusion, Trump channels Reagan less through "reality TV" than through the "zombie apocalypse" genre: with Trump we not only get the death of democracy, we get to watch it mindlessly devouring itself, as reality itself has become more horrific than the dystopias Postman could imagine in his lifetime (he died in 2003). Strate does note that "I think Postman held out great hope for education as a way of addressing these problems." Postman wrote several books about education, but the one I read and treasured as a high school dropout was Teaching as a Subversive Activity, written with Charles Weingartner in 1969. The authors there posited that the highest goal of teaching was to get students to develop acute "bullshit detectors." Needless to say, that was not on the curriculum of the high school I dropped out of, nor has it gained much currency since then. Indeed, the recent focus on nothing but test scores teaches "crap-detection" only by burying students in it. It's not like critical thinking has disappeared, but those in power have done their best to banish it to the isolated corners of society, and are reaping the fruits of their astonishing incompetence. In some sense it would be comforting to blame all this on the obliteration of words by images. Still, I'm somewhat more suspicious of the triumph of money over morals.

  For another take on Trump/Reagan see:

• Susan B Glasser: Is Trump the Second Coming of Reagan? "[Brett Baier] knows that our current president is louder, cruder, and ruder than Ronald Reagan, 'a counterpuncher' from New York far different from the genial Republican predecessor."

• Sarah Kliff: The new Trump plan to defund Planned Parenthood, explained: "Women's health clinics that provide abortions or refer patients for the procedure will be cut off from a key source of federal funding under new Trump administration rules expected to be released Friday."

• Matthew Lee: Pompeo: 'Swagger' of State Department Is 'America's Essential Rightness': In his recent closed door pep talk, Pompeo reportedly said: "Swagger is not arrogance; it is not boastfulness, it is not ego. No, swagger is confidence, in one's self, in one's ideas. In our case, it is America's essential rightness. And it is aggressiveness born of the righteous knowledge that our cause is just, special, and built upon America's core principles." Maybe the words he understands even less than "swagger" are: "arrogance," "boastfulness," and "ego." He went on to underscore his confusion by adding: "we should carry that diplomatic swagger to the ends of the earth; humbly, nobly and with the skill and courage I know you all possess." OK, add "humbly" to the list of words he doesn't begin to understand.

• Dara Lind: Trump on deported immigrants: "They're not people. They're animals."

  If Trump understands his own administration's policy, he's never acknowledged it in public. He sticks to the same rhetorical move every time: refer to some specific criminals, call them horrible people and animals, say that their evil justifies his immigration policy, and allow the conflation of all immigrants and all Latinos with criminals and animals to remain subtext.

  This is who Donald Trump has been for his entire political career. The worst-case scenarios about his dehumanizing rhetoric -- that they would foment large-scale mob violence or vigilantism against Latinos in the United States -- have not been realized. But neither have any hopes that Trump, as president, might ever weigh his words with any care at all, especially when encouraging Americans to see human beings as less than human.

  Also see: Juan Escalante: It's not just rhetoric: Trump's policies treat immigrants like me as "animals".

• Charles P Pierce: Can the Republic Recover from Donald Trump?: Good question, but the post is all question, no answer. I don't think this quite rises to the level of an assumption, but the default sentiment is that before Trump we had norms, and now clearly we don't. But wouldn't it be, uh, normal to revert to norms once the disruption is removed? I don't think that's how it works. To pick an obvious example, GW Bush did a lot of shit -- tax cuts, defense buildup, the War on Terror, "no child left behind," "tort reform," the pivot away from "Peace Process" to Sharon on Israel, packing the courts with right-wingers -- that Barack Obama never came close to reversing. In fact, he rarely tried, because even though there was voluminous evidence that nearly everything Bush touch made the world worse, he tacitly accepted that changed world order. To reverse what Bush did, Obama would have had to work much harder than Bush did to break it all. We can debate whether Trump is even worse than Bush, but one thing that is clear is that Trump's world is even more fragile than Bush's, because so much of what Bush (and Clinton and Bush and Reagan and, sad to say, Carter, Ford, Nixon, and LBJ) broke was never fixed. On the other hand, Trump's efforts to wipe out everything worthwhile Obama did have already been almost complete, achieved with remarkable ease. On the other hand, they haven't fixed anything. They've simply made everything worse. It's like we're struggling against the second law of thermodynamics, where it take enormous energy to order anything, but no effort at all to let it turn to shit.

  I don't normally read Pierce, but he seems to have been on quite a roll lately, at least title-deep:

  • Paul Ryan Is an Almost Comically Inept Speaker of the House

  • We Have Many Freedoms in America. Only One Requires These Kinds of Sacrifices. Guns, in case that isn't obvious.

  • Fox News Employees' Heads Are Exploding at the Prospect of Having to Show Basic Human Decency.

  • Democrats Join in to Make Torture a Bipartisan Affair: Gina Haspel.

  • Torture Doesn't Work, Unless You Want a Promotion: More Haspel.

• Frank Rich: Trump's Jerusalem Horror Show: Structured as an interview, so it quickly wanders onto other topics, like Kelly Sadler's "joke" about John McCain dying and the Trump legacy of never apologizing for anything bigoted (or merely stupid), and praise for the late journalist Tom Wolfe. For what little it's worth, I don't think I ever read anything by Wolfe, but I was aware of him and always suspected that his "Radical Chic" was the opening salvo in the long term assault on liberal sympathies for the poor and downtrodden, dismissing them as elitist conceits, conveniently dismissing the problems themselves.

  For more on the Jerusalem embassy event, see: Michelle Goldberg: A Grotesque Spectacle in Jerusalem:

  The event was grotesque. It was a consummation of the cynical alliance between hawkish Jews and Zionist evangelicals who believe that the return of Jews to Israel will usher in the apocalypse and the return of Christ, after which Jews who don't convert will burn forever. . . .

  This spectacle, geared toward Donald Trump's Christian American base, coincided with a massacre about 40 miles away. Since March 30, there have been mass protests at the fence separating Gaza and Israel. Gazans, facing an escalating humanitarian crisis due in large part to an Israeli blockade, are demanding the right to return to homes in Israel that their families were forced from at Israel's founding. . . . The Israeli military has responded with live gunfire as well as rubber bullets and tear gas. In clashes on Monday, at least 58 Palestinians were killed and thousands wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

  The juxtaposition of images of dead and wounded Palestinians and Ivanka Trump smiling in Jerusalem like a Zionist Marie Antoinette tell us a lot about America's relationship to Israel right now.

  Somewhere in all of this people have forgotten why moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem matters in the first place. The British held a League of Nations mandate for Palestine since 1920, after the colony was carved out of the former Ottoman Empire. That was renewed by the UN on its founding in 1945, but the British tired of trying to rule Palestine, so threw the problem back to the UN to sort out by 1948. The UN convened a commission to "study" the issue, and they came up with a partition plan that would divide Palestine into three sections: a mostly Jewish segment across the Jezreel Valley, down the coast, and extended through the Negev to Eilat; an almost exclusively Muslim-Christian territory broken into three segments (Gaza, West Bank, West Galilee) plus the isolated city of Jaffa; and, finally, an "international" area centered on Jerusalem. Ben Gurion and the Zionists lobbied hard to secure UN approval of the partition plan, then took that mandate and launched offensives to capture Jerusalem, West Galilee, and Jaffa, and to reduce and concentrate Gaza. Meanwhile, Transjordan grabbed up the West Bank and East Jerusalem, dividing the city while leaving the Palestinians nothing. Subsequent UN resolutions, following international law, insisted that Palestinian refugees should be able to return in peace to their homes, and that the expansion of Israel following the 1967 war, especially the annexation of greater Jerusalem, was "inadmissible." The US has always supported (in word, anyway) the sanctity and applicability of international law, and in the 1980s the PLO reoriented itself to embrace a solution based on law.

  One might argue that the US has never been really serious about international law, especially as Americans have claimed the right to ignore any parts they find inconvenient (e.g., the refusal to join the International Criminal Court, and the decision to ignore POW status/rights in the Global War on Terror). But Eisenhower was willing and able to pressure Israel to return land seized in 1956 (although Johnson made no similar effort in 1967), and Carter got Israel to reverse its 1977 intervention in Lebanon (which Reagan fatefully allowed to resume in 1982). At least, GWH Bush and Clinton made something of an effort to get "two state" peace talks going, but since 2001 (when GW Bush and Sharon came to power) the US has steadily retreated, often just rubber-stamping Israeli decisions on war and foreign policy. (Obama did negotiate the Iran nuke deal over Israeli objections, but he did nothing effective to advance peace and justice in the area Israel controls.) With Trump, what we are seeing is a total surrender of American interests to Netanyahu's political agenda. The embassy move is hardly the worst submission, but given its long centrality has great symbolic portent. This is well understood in Israel and among Palestinians, but given how long and how thoroughly Americans have deceived themselves about Israel, it is scarcely commented on here. The fact that Israel can bomb Iranians in Syria and shoot marchers in Gaza with absolutely no concern for how bad such acts look is testimony to how completely Trump has surrendered to Israel (or maybe just to Sheldon Adelson, who speaks fluent Trump, sealing the deal with a $30 million check).

  More links on Israel-Palestine:

  • Mustafa Barghouti: In Opening Its Embassy in Jerusalem, the US Has Slammed the Door on the Peace Process.

  • Moustafa Bayoumi: In America's news headlines, Palestinians die mysterious deaths.

  • John Cassidy: Israel Kills Dozens of Unarmed Protesters in Gaza as Jared Kushner Speaks of Peace, in Jerusalem.

  • Michael H Fuchs: The US-Israeli relationship faces a storm on the horizon.

  • Rashid Khalidi: 'The Palestinians Have Not Forgotten, They Have Not Gone Away'.

  • Charles P Pierce: Republicans' Apocalyptic Fantasies Are Now Playing Out in the Middle East.

• Zachary Roth: Is the System Rigged Against Democrats? Sure it is, right down to the New York Times substituting a Reagan campaign poster for the book cover or any other relevant graphic in this review of Davis Faris' slim book It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. Unfortunately, Faris focuses on re-rigging the system:

  To end gerrymandering, Faris says, they should scrap the winner-take-all method we use to elect members of the House and replace it with a system known as "ranked choice voting" that better reflects voter preferences. To fix the problem of Democratic underrepresentation in the Senate, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico should get statehood, and California should be split into seven separate states. Democrats should add seats to the Supreme Court and fill them with progressives. And they should reform voting laws to ban onerous voter ID requirements, re-enfranchise ex-felons and automatically register everyone to vote.

  I'm not unaware of structural factors which make the system less representative and less responsive to voter wishes, but the real problem Democrats face is getting voters to trust and support them, which is pretty much the same thing as getting Democrats to trust and support a clear majority of the voting public -- enough to overcome whatever structural deficits the party endures. Thanks to the Republicans' ideology, platform, and track record, that shouldn't be hard -- but, of course, given the pervasive influence of money, media, and mythology, it is. I wouldn't call this dirty, but one thing Democrats have to learn -- something that Republicans have definitely figured out -- is that it matters whether they win or not.

• Dylan Scott: Who is the freeloader: the working poor on food stamps -- or corporations that don't pay them enough? Sen. Sherrod Brown starts with the insight that food stamps, medicare, etc., effectively subsize companies who underpay their workers by allowing people to work for less than they really need to live on, then tries to turn the tables on those companies. But he doesn't come up with a very good way of doing so, and his rhetoric about "corporate freeloaders" plays into the conceit that getting something for nothing is morally wrong. If you want to reduce welfare benefits, a more straightforward way to do that would be to legislate higher minimum wages. Even so, that leaves some problem cases, like earners trying to support larger families (more children or other dependents). In many cases, it would be preferable to provide more welfare benefits, and pay for them out of taxes on excessive profits and wages. Unfortunately, many liberals buy into the notion that welfare is a bad thing, and think they're scoring points with phrases like "corporate welfare." Doesn't the Constitution talk about "promoting the general welfare" as being one of the tasks of good government? Isn't the right's generic attack on government effectively an effort to reduce the general welfare?

  I think this confusion about welfare partly explains why the farm bill has become such a political football. See Tara Golshan: A House revolt over immigration just killed the farm bill -- for now. I don't really understand what immigration has to do with this, and indeed the reports are contradictory: evidently some Republicans want to force action on DACA, and others want to vote on a more restrictive anti-immigrant bill. For some time now, there has been a right-wing faction which opposed government efforts to stabilize agricultural markets -- rhetorically their complaints about "corporate welfare" have some resonance with liberals -- but this year they've managed to insert some poisonous "work requirements" into the food stamp program, moving Democrats into opposition. By taking advantage of mainstream Republicans' embrace of Trump cruelty, a few dozen Koch-funded fanatics are threatening American agribusiness. It's an interesting example of dysfunction within the GOP.

• Emily Stewart: Donald Trump is raging over the Mueller investigation on Twitter; also by Stewart: Roger Stone acknowledges he might be indicted, and Donald Trump Jr. and Trump aides were reportedly open to foreign help in 2016 election beyond Russia (especially UAE and Saudi Arabia). I am of the camp that regards Mueller's investigation as largely a distraction, although it does tangentially touch on two more serious stories: the profound corruption of the US electoral process, and the deeply ingrained corruption of the Trump family and their cronies and enablers. Still, one thing remains amusing: how guilty Trump continues to look. As I recall, the thing that finally got to Nixon about Watergate wasn't the specific crime, but all the other things he was doing that could have been exposed in the investigation (of course, many "dirty tricks" did in fact come to light).

  There's been a big media push from Republican flacks complaining about how the Mueller investigation has now dragged on for an entire year, so that got me to wondering how long the Starr investigation into Clinton lasted? There's a chart of all past Special Counsel investigations in Amelia Thomson DeVeaux: Mueller Is Moving Quickly Compared to Past Special Counsel Investigations, and it shows that Starr's "Whitewater" investigation lasted a little more than six years. The upshot there was that Starr eventually caught Clinton in a lie that had nothing whatsoever to do with the original subject, but which provided House Republicans with an excuse to impeach Clinton (even knowing there was no chance the Senate would convict him). The Clinton/Starr experience convinced many of us that the Special Counsel law was an invitation to political abuse, and it has rarely been used since then. (The only time before Russia was the Valerie Plame leak, which was one of the shortest ever.) When Trump wails about the "greatest witch hunt ever," he's being very forgetful (as well as whiny).

• Matt Taibbi: The Battle of Woodstock: "First in a series of diaries from the oddest House primary race in America" -- NY-19, where Taibbi is following Jeff Beals. Enter the DCCC. Hard to tell whether their ignorance or interest will turn out more self-defeating. Speaking of the DCCC and the Democratic Party old guard, see: Joe Biden Clarifies He's No Bernie Sanders: "I Don't Think 500 Billionaires Are Reason We're in Trouble, adding "The folks at the top aren't bad guys." Maybe not all of them, but ones like Sheldon Adelson, Charles Koch, Robert Mercer, Art Pope, and Betsy DeVos kind of skew the sample. Oh, also Donald Trump -- he may or may not be a billionaire, but he plays one on TV. Billionaires who donate to Democrats aren't exempt, either. Bill Gates was in the news last week making fun of Trump, but one shouldn't forget his effort to corner the Internet back in the 1990s, resulting in a conviction for antitrust violations.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

I finally finished reading Katy Tur's Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History. That would be the Trump campaign, which she covered from May 2015 to election night, choosing the most value-neutral terms she can stomach ("craziest"?). Pretty short on analysis and critical insight, but she found herself the target of Trump's ire and bullying often enough to develop a real distaste for the man -- especially during rallies where Trump whipped up the frenzied masses and threatened to unleash them on the press section. Still, she witnessed enough of Trump's effect on his adoring crowds to take them seriously -- just not enough to tell us much about them. That's partly because a large slice of the book is about her art and craft; i.e., how trivial TV "news" reporting really is. The book is organized with chapters on the road intercut with as many bits on election day and night, as it dawns on everyone that the unthinkable has happened. One memorable line: "To actually watch Trump's miracle come in is a shock like missing the last stair or sugaring your coffee with what proves to be salt. It's not just an intellectual experience. The whole body responds." The following page (p. 279) includes a bit on Michael Cohen (no longer "best known for an appearance on CNN back in August") celebrating at the victory party.

This is the third (or fourth or fifth) book on the election season I've read, after Matt Taibbi: Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus and Jonathan Allen/Amie Parnes: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, and one might also add Bernie Sanders: Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (first part a memoir of the campaign, followed by a platform statement) and/or David Frum: Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (more on the campaign, especially the DNC hacks, but carries into a critique of the Trump administration). None of these are likely to stand as history -- Taibbi has the best instincts, but threw his book too fast from already dated pieces without sorting out or understanding the whiplash. Nor have I seen much that looks promising.

I suspect that when historians finally develop the stomach to relive the 2016 campaign, they'll recognize in Trump's campaign rallies some variant on the common theme of religious revivalism mixed in with a surprisingly adroit scam of both mass and highly-targeted media, with the Kochs, Mercers, and (yes) Russians lurking in the background. On the other hand, most Democrats couldn't see how brittle and lacklustre Clinton's path to the nomination was, and therefore how vulnerable she was to a shameless demagogue like Trump. Much of this is hinted at in various chronicles and broadsides, but thus far most observers have been so committed to their particular views that they've overshot the mark.

On the other hand, each new week offers more insights into the strange worldview of Donald Trump and the increasingly strange world he is plunging us into. The two major stories this past week are Trump's repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal (oddly juxtaposed with official optimism for a similar deal with North Korea) and much more information about Trump attorney Michael Cohen's efforts to cash in on his client's election.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The week's 4 biggest political stories, explained: President Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal; Trump set a date to negotiate a nuclear deal with Korea (June 12 in Singapore); Michael Cohen got caught with his hand in the cookie jar; Trump admitted he's not doing some stuff ("the White House admitted that despite those promises, there will be no 2018 infrastructure bill . . . Trump dropped promises to have Medicare negotiate cheaper rates"). Other Yglesias posts:

  • Drug company stocks really liked today's Trump speech on drug prices: Chart shows the SPDR S&P Pharmaceuticals index spiking after the speech (although note the momentary dip, as if it took a few minutes for the early tough talk to be discounted. "The president is very selective about which promises he keeps, with the "economic populist" ones seemingly always the ones to end up on the cutting room floor."

  • There's an easier way for California to build greener housing: just build more homes. Hard to read the chart here, but the states with 40+ tons or carbon dioxide per person are Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, and (I think) Louisiana. On the low end, with less than 10 tons, are District of Columbia, New York, California, Oregon, and (I think) Massachusetts.

  • Sheldon Adelson cuts $30 million check to help House Republicans win the midterms. "The $30 million the octogenarian casino billionaire is spending on the midterms may sound like a lot, but it's actually a drop in the bucket compared to what Adelson's heirs will gain thanks to the estate tax cut provisions of Trump tax bill alone. . . . The same goes for even richer people like the Koch brothers, who are planning to spend even larger sums in the midterms."

  • Michael Cohen's LLC got secret corporate payments. What about Trump's shell companies? More significant than the revelation that a crony like Cohen would seek to profit from his association with Trump is the revelation that a number of big name companies were eager to buy his "services."

    In a normal presidency, it would be very difficult to make large, secret cash payments to the president of the United States as a means of currying favor with him. You could donate to his reelection campaign, but that would have to be disclosed. And you could hire people who you believe to have a relationship with him in hopes that they can peddle influence on your behalf (as AT&T and Novartis apparently did with Cohen), but it might not work.

    But there would be basically no way to directly pay the president in secret. Trump has changed that. It's completely unclear how Avenatti came to be in possession of the documents that reveal the payments to Essential Consultants, but it came about due to some kind of leak. Had they not leaked, we would still be in the dark. And since no financial documents related to any of the many LLCs that Trump controls personally have leaked, we have no idea who is paying him or why. . . .

    If Trump disclosed his tax returns, as is customary for presidential candidates, then those returns would contain fairly detailed statements regarding the incomes of these various entities. It would, of course, still be possible to conceal the true source of income through the use of further shell companies. A firm that wanted to pay Trump could, for example, create an indirectly controlled intermediary shell company, give money to that shell entity, and then have the shell entity hire DT Aerospace (Bermuda) LLC or whichever other Trump-owned firm it likes. But if we saw Trump's books, we would at least see clear evidence of him getting paid by mystery entities that could then be investigated by Congress or by journalists on their own terms.

    Without the tax returns, however, we know nothing.

    The tax return issue has long since fallen off the front burner of the political debate. It has come to be viewed in some circles as an esoteric or pathetic hang-up of Trump's opponents. But it's quite clear that the Trump Organization continues to be aggressively profit-seeking, quite clear that companies and individuals with interests in American politics openly seek to court Trump's favor by patronizing his hotel and clubs, and now clear that at least some companies with significant regulatory interests have also sought to advance their policy agenda via secret cash payments to an LLC controlled by a Trump associate.

    More Cohen links:

    • Zack Beauchamp: Viktor Vekselberg, the man at the center of the week's biggest Trump-Russia news, explained.

    • Jen Kirby: Ford turned down Michael Cohen's consulting pitch.

    • Andrew Prokop: Corporations are giving absurd explanations for why they hired Michael Cohen: "He's apparently an expert in health care policy and accounting low now. Who knew?" Alternate theory: because the more readily understood reasons were potential crimes?

    • Richard Wolffe: Michael Cohen is 'in business'. But just what sort of business is he in?

  • Republicans are deploying troll feminism to try to get Gina Haspel confirmed: "Bad-faith arguments about gender representation from people who don't believe in it."

  • Stormy Daniels is crowding out Democrats' 2018 message.

• Barbara Ehrenreich: Patriarchy Deflated.

• Henry Farrell: The "Intellectual Dark Web," explained: what Jordan Peterson has in common with the alt-right: In response to Bari Weiss: Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, a group of "thinkers" whose common thread seems to be an eagerness to rationalize various forms of bigotry. IDW, evidently taken from a website which follows and certifies them, strikes me as a silly name. Such people don't seem to be especially obscure -- the best known to me is Sam Harris, who promotes atheism by slandering Islam. (Chris Hedges featured him prominently in I Don't Believe in Atheists.) As Farrell points out, there is nothing new in their fancy for theories of racial and sexual superiority -- indeed, we're not far removed from a time when such pseudo-science was commonplace. For another reaction, see Michelle Goldberg: How the Online Left Fuels the Right, which doesn't really argue what the title suggests -- more like how hard it is for the left to be understood through the jaundiced views of the right.

  One suspects the same title writer had a hand in Gerard Alexander: Liberals, You're Not as Smart as You Think You Are. I'm not as touchy about petty slander of liberals as I am of the left, probably because as a teen, even though I had absorbed most of the liberal/progressive view of American history, I associated liberals with the Cold War and even more so the hot war in Vietnam, and I wound up devouring books like Robert Paul Wolff's The Poverty of Liberalism. I mellowed later, partly as most of the liberal hawks turned into neocons, and partly because middle class society I grew up in no longer looked so oppressive. Still, I've always maintained a basic distinction between liberals and leftists: the former focus on individuals and their freedom, emphasizing equal opportunities over results; the latter think more of classes and aggregates, of social relations, and aim for equal results (within some practicable limits). Conservatives rarely bother with such distinctions: their cardinal principle is to preserve inequality from birth onward, so they view liberals and leftists as interchangeable, and this has led to an uneasy alliance between defined by a common enemy. Still, my disquisition is beside the point here. Alexander is one of those who group anyone resisting the conservative onslaught as liberal. And his point is that liberals aren't as effective as they should be, because they're kind of annoying:

  Liberals dominate the entertainment industry, many of the most influential news sources and America's universities. This means that people with progressive leanings are everywhere in the public eye -- and are also on the college campuses attended by many people's children or grandkids. These platforms come with a lot of power to express values, confer credibility and celebrity and start national conversations that others really can't ignore.

  But this makes liberals feel more powerful than they are. Or, more accurately, this kind of power is double-edged. Liberals often don't realize how provocative or inflammatory they can be. In exercising their power, they regularly not only persuade and attract but also annoy and repel.

  In fact, liberals may be more effective at causing resentment than in getting people to come their way. I'm not talking about the possibility that jokes at the 2011 correspondents' association dinner may have pushed Mr. Trump to run for president to begin with. I mean that the "army of comedy" that Michael Moore thought would bring Mr. Trump down will instead be what builds him up in the minds of millions of voters.

  I rather doubt that even the premise is true here. There are a lot of conservatives in academia, and behind the scenes right-wing donors (like the Kochs) have inordinate influence. Media and entertainment companies (increasingly the same thing) are owned by rich megacorps, backed by even richer bankers. The media isn't divided between left and right. It is either blatantly right-partisan or equivocally mainstream, attempting to balance "legitimate" politician viewpoints while covering news only to the extent it fits within the conventional wisdom and is entertaining. Needless to say, this dynamic has been very helpful for the right -- not just by bottling much of their base up in a propaganda bubble, where they can dismiss inconvenient news as the work of liberal elites, but by demanding their "enemies" grant them a degree of legitimacy that never need be reciprocated.

  As for the "army of comedy," it's pretty certain that no Trump fans are tuning in, so whatever umbrage they take comes secondhand, usually with context removed (see, e.g., the right-wing reaction to the Michelle Wolf event). I've watched Stephen Colbert and Seth Myers -- thanks to DVR, just the opening parts -- ever since the election, and I must say that they have helped to make this stretch of time more tolerable. They offer a useful but not-very-reliable daily news recap -- mostly stories I've already read about -- but more important for me is the solidarity with the audience: I'm reminded every weekday night that I'm not alone, that there are a lot of people out there as appalled by Trump as I am. (Indeed, proof of audience numbers is that fact that staid corporations allow those shows to air.)

  Alexander goes on to fault liberals for attacking racism with "a wide brush," to harping on "microaggressions," to their "tremendous intellectual and moral self-confidence that smacks of superiority." Still, there's nothing pecularly liberal about these complaints. Conservatives hold almost identically opposite views -- what else can you make of their constant harping about "political correctness" and "liberal elites"? On the other hand, conservative umbrage is often about changing the subject -- e.g., try squaring the complaint that "liberal politicians portrayed conservative positions on immigration reform as presumptively racist" with Trump's "shithole countries" remark. Maybe it is possible to construct an anti-immigration platform that isn't racist, but it's damn hard to sell it to the American people on any other basis, and we have good evidence that many of the people who are pushing such a program are doing so for staunchly racist reasons. And consider this paragraph:

  Liberals are trapped in a self-reinforcing cycle. When they use their positions in American culture to lecture, judge and disdain, they push more people into an opposing coalition that liberals are increasingly prone to think of as deplorable. That only validates their own worst prejudices about the other America.

  Not only can you substitute "conservatives" for "liberals" there, doing so would make it even more true. Maybe the title should have been, "Conservatives, You're Not as Smart as You Think You Are"?

• Conor Friedersdorf: It's Time for Trump Voters to Face the Bitter Truth: "Republicans elected a president who promised to take on D.C. -- instead, Trump has presided over an extraordinary auction of access and influence." It seems like it's only a matter of time before even Trump voters realize how extraordinarily corrupt Trump and his circle are, with Michael Cohen's influence peddling a prime example:

  Back in 2016, "established K Street firms were grabbing any Trump people they could find," Nick Confessore reported in "How to Get Rich in Trump's Washington," a feature for The New York Times Magazine. "Jim Murphy, Trump's former political director, joined the lobbying giant BakerHostetler, while another firm, Fidelis Government Relations, struck up a partnership with Bill Smith, Mike Pence's former chief of staff. All told, close to 20 ex-aides of Trump, friends, and hangers-on had made their way into Washington's influence business."

  Brian Ballard, a longtime Trump acquaintance, seems to have leveraged his relationship to the president most profitably. The Turkish government is among his firm's many clients. Politico says Turkey pays $125,000 per month. Why does it find that price worthwhile?

  George David Banks was a top energy aide to Donald Trump who came from the world of lobbying. But he quit his job in the White House when he couldn't get a security clearance. Here's what he told E&E News, an energy trade publication: "Going back to be a full-time swamp creature is certainly an attractive option." Then he rejoined his former post at the American Council for Capital Formation, a think tank and lobbying group. I guess he wasn't joking.

  Remember when Trump told you that he would release his tax returns and then never did? Remember when he said that if he won the election he would put his business interests aside? "Ever since Trump and his family arrived in Washington they have essentially hung a for-sale sign on the White House by refusing to meaningfully separate themselves from their own business interests," Bloomberg's Tim O'Brien notes. "That's certainly not lost on the companies that do business in or with Washington. They know that in Trump's swamp, you pay to play."

• Tara Golshan: Trump may just blow up the farm bill over demanding food stamp work requirements. I've long seen the Agriculture bill as a compromise deal between rural politicians who want market supports for farmers and agribusiness and urban politicians who want to fund SNAP (the "food stamp" program). Both sides have been uneasy about such a deal -- stupidly, I think, especially when they resort to anti-welfare arguments. Some wish to cut back or kill off what they see as subsidies to corporate agribusiness, and I don't doubt that there are aspects of the bill that could be tightened up. But much of the business side of the bill is necessary to stabilize notoriously volatile markets, and that stability and solvency helps make food relatively affordable for everyone. Some libertarians oppose such efforts, but most conservatives are fine with business-as-usual, so the far-right has focused on blowing up SNAP, and their chosen vector is "work requirements" for recipients. In one sense that seems innocuous: most SNAP recipients do in fact work -- albeit for wages too low to feed their families. Actually, there are four key beneficiaries to SNAP: the recipients; their employers, as this helps to keep low-wage jobs viable; retailers, who cash food stamps at retail prices; and agribusiness (farmers but especially processed food companies), who benefit from the larger market. But while most Republicans approve of at least the last three, the "moral critique" of welfare has become such a reflex among the far-right -- not least because Democrats from Daniel Moynahan to Bill Clinton have lent credence to the chorus -- that all they can see is an opportunity to harass and hurt poor people. Not a big surprise that Trump should get caught up in their rhetoric. Among other things, there is probably no area of government that he understands less about than agricultural policy. (Not that there aren't other areas where zero applies, but given that rural areas voted so heavily for him, his lack of understanding and interest is especially glaring.)

  By the way, one of the most outspoken saboteurs of agriculture bills past was Tim Huelskamp, who represented the massive 1st District in west Kansas. He wound up upsetting farmers and businesses in the district so badly that they challenged him in the Republican primary and beat him -- the only case I know of where a right-winger has been purged by regular Republicans.

  For another comment on the agriculture bill and SNAP, see Paul Krugman: Let Them Eat Trump Steaks, where he notes:

  And yes, this means that some of the biggest victims of Trump's obsession with cutting "welfare" will be the very people who put him in office.

  Consider Owsley County, Ky., at the epicenter of Appalachia's regional crisis. More than half the county's population receives food stamps; 84 percent of its voters supported Trump in 2016. Did they know what they were voting for?

  In the end, I don't believe there's any policy justification for the attack on food stamps: It's not about the incentives, and it's not about the money. And even the racial animus that traditionally underlies attacks on U.S. social programs has receded partially into the background.

  No, this is about petty cruelty turned into a principle of government. It's about privileged people who look at the less fortunate and don't think, "There but for the grace of God go I"; they just see a bunch of losers. They don't want to help the less fortunate; in fact, they get angry at the very idea of public aid that makes those losers a bit less miserable.

• Jen Kirby/Emily Stewart: The very long list of high-profile White House departures: Cheat sheet, in case you need a reminder. Actually, not nearly as long as it should be.

• Ezra Klein: American democracy as faced worse threats than Donald Trump. "We had a Civil War, after all." Point taken, but I have little confidence that, should Trump be deposed (even routinely in the 2020 election) that some/many of his supporters won't also elect "to exercise their Second Amendment rights." And after that, Klein's list starts to peter out. "We interned families of Japanese descent." Yeah, bad, but how is that really different from what INS is doing now? Or that we're currently running the largest and most intensive mass incarceration system in the world? "We pitched into the Iraq War based on lies." And Trump has recommitted us to the domain of truth? How can anyone write this the same week Trump tried to destroy the Iran nuclear deal? Or a year after Trump withdrew from the Paris Accords? I suppose Klein does us a service reminding us that "the era that we often hold up as the golden age of American democracy was far less democratic, far less liberal, far less decent, than [we think it was] today." Where he gets into trouble is in omitting those bracketed words, implying that today's political/economic/cultural order is more democratic, more liberal, and more decent than any time in America's past. One might credit some people with striving to make that true, but damn few of them hold any degree of power or even influence, and those people who do are pretty damn explicit about their campaign against democracy, liberalism, and decency (although they may prefer other words). The fact is nobody knows how bad it actually is, let alone how bad it's likely to get. The fact is that Trump has maintained the same 40% approval rate he was elected with, despite near-daily embarrassments. The Republicans hold structural advantages in Congress and the courts and all across the nation that they exploit ruthlessly and without shame. And the rich people who bankrolled them are only getting richer, with segment of the media in their pockets -- making sure that no serious changes are possible, regardless of how bad they screw things up.

  I don't mind that Klein is trying to put forth "the case for optimism about America." Nor do I doubt that he brings up things that could help to change the current course. And he's young enough to enjoy some hope that he'll live to see a change. But that's far from a lock, or even a good bet. Much of today's bad policy will only have incremental effect, slowly adding up until something serious breaks -- a causality that many won't notice even when it's too late. It was, after all, decisions early in the 1980s under Reagan that led to stagnant wages, inflated profits, and poisonous inequality. Al Qaeda and ISIS are direct descendants of the US decision in 1979 to back Islamic Jihad in Afghanistan, although that too can be traced back to American decisions from 1945 on to take a dominant role in Middle Eastern oil and, only slightly later, to turn against the Soviet Union and progressive movements everywhere. Alongside the Cold War, the late 1940s passage of Taft-Hartley started to turn the tide against labor unions, over time reducing them from a third to a twelfth of the private sector workforce. The failure to take climate change seriously is similarly rooted in the politics of oil, and in the corruption that the Reagan-era mantra "greed is good" promoted. Trump and virtually all Republicans have embraced this ideology and continue to promote it -- indeed, will so until it fails them, most probably catastrophically.

  I'm pretty suspicious of people like Yascha Mounk, interviewed by Klein in the audio accompanying this piece (and no, I didn't listen to the interview), but I do think Trump is "breaking norms" in ways that are simply treacherous. For instance, see Jen Kirby: Poll: most Republicans now think Trump is being framed by the FBI. Now personally, I'm pretty suspicious of the FBI, and I realize that they have a long history of abusing their power to hunt and hurt those they regard as enemies. Still, Trump is not the sort of guy who easily finds himself on the FBI enemies list. But more importantly, the source of this suspicion is clearly the Trump camp, in a cynical attempt to condition his followers to reject any actual evidence of wrong-doing. This is actually an old trick -- one Trump plied before the election when he argued that the system is rigged against him and vowed not to accept "fake news" reports of his loss.

• Mark Landler: Clashing Views on Iran Reflect a New Balance of Power in the Cabinet: Article credits John Bolton as the decisive force behind Trump's abandonment of the agreement Obama and Kerry negotiated to resolve the supposed crisis of Iran's nuclear program (really just separating uranium isotopes), with Mike Pompeo the swing vote, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis opposed ("but did not push the case as vocally toward the end"). More Iran links:

  • Peter Beinart: Abandoning Iran Deal, U.S. Joins Israel in Axis of Escalation, who sums up in a tweet: "There are now two Wests. One, led by the leaders of Germany, France + UK, which believes in liberal democracy and international law. And a second, headquartered in Washington + Jerusalem, which holds those values in contempt." By the way, Beinart previously wrote: Trump May Already Be Violating the Iran Deal.

  • Phyllis Bennis: Is Trump's Abandonment of the Iran Nuke Deal a Prelude to War? Given that Israel attacked alleged Iranian targets in Syria within hours of Trump's announcement, I'd have to say yes. Israel had spent the previous week warning about Iran's desire to attack Israel, so it seems likely that Netanyahu was hoping to provoke an attack. Had it come from Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel could respond like they did in 2006. On the other hand, had it come from Iran itself, Israel would no doubt have appealed to Trump to do the honors -- given that US forces in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf were much closer to Iranian targets. I doubt that Trump actually wants to start a war with Iran, but subcontracting US foreign policy to Israel and the Saudis runs that risk. It was, after all, those countries which put all the pressure on Trump to break the Iran deal. Indeed, they put all the pressure on the US to address the so-called crisis of Iran's "nuclear program" in the first place, only to reject the only possible solution to their anxieties. For more on Israel, see Richard Silverman below. For more on the Saudis, see Ben Freeman/William D Hartung: How the Saudis Wooed Donald Trump.

  • Michael Klare: The Road to Hell in the Middle East.

  • Trita Parsi: Who Ordered Black Cube's Dirty Tricks? Hired by the White House, the Israeli company was tasked to "find or fabricate incriminating information about former Obama administration officials, as well as people and organizations that had a part in securing the Iran nuclear deal."

  • Paul R Pillar: Hold the Deal-Killers Accountable.

  • Matt Shuham: Promising Chinese Jobs, Trump Commits to Backing Off Iran Sanctions Violator ZTE: At least Trump cares about someone's jobs.

  • Richard Silverman: Bibi Gins Up Another War to Save His Political Ass: Within hours of Trump's deal breaking, Israeli planes bombed Iranian targets within Syria. And, well, "Bibi's polling numbers have shot through the roof since the last attack on Syria."

  • Jon Swaine: US threatens European companies with sanctions after Iran deal pullout.

  • Stephen M Walt: The Art of the Regime Change: The assumption of the deal breakers is that when the Iranian people realize that they can no longer enjoy the fruits of friendship with the US, they'll revolt and overthrow their clerical masters and replace them with a new regime that will show sufficient deference to the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. Either that, or they'll do so after the US blows up a sufficient swath of the country. Neither, well, seems very realistic, not that the US lacks the capability to show them what real nuclear powers can do.

    Otto von Bismarck once quipped that it was good to learn from one's mistakes but better to learn from someone else's. This latest episode shows that the United States is not really capable of learning from either. And it suggests that Winston Churchill's apocryphal comment about the United States always doing the right thing should now be revised. Under Trump, it appears, the United States will always do the wrong thing but only after first considering -- and rejecting -- all the obviously superior alternatives.

  • Philip Weiss: By wrecking Iran deal, Trump politicized Israel: Not that that hurts Trump, but virtually every Democrat in Washington supported the Iran nuke deal, and now it's going to be hard for them to deny that Israel was the driving force behind wrecking it.

    If there was one bright spot in the day, it was the almost universal anger and anguish that followed Trump's speech, and the determination to try and undo his action by any means the rest of us can. Even the neoconservatives who have pushed this action seemed afraid of what it meant. Even Chuck Schumer, who had opposed his own president on the Iran deal three years ago because of the "threat to Israel," was against Trump.

    On the other hand, just this week Sheldon Adelson wrote the Republicans a $30 million check. Sure suggests "pay to play" is still live and well in the new Trump swamp. Also that the US can be steered into war pretty damn cheap.

• Dara Lind: Donald Trump is reportedly furious that the US can't shut down the border:

  Nielsen, as well as Attorney General Jeff Sessions, apparently tried to explain to the president that the federal government is constrained in what it can do by the law, but Trump reportedly wasn't having it. "We need to shut it down," he yelled at Nielsen at one point, per the Post report. "We're closed."

  Yelling at people is a management tactic for President Trump; sometimes his anger inspires long-held grudges, but sometimes it dissipates once he's gotten it off his chest. But he's spent the past month in an apparent panic about the border, and his outburst at Nielsen shows it isn't going away.

  The president's tantrum is totally divorced from policy reality: The government can't "shut it down," and Nielsen and Sessions appear to be working aggressively to do what they can to crack down at the border. But Trump's panic is the inevitable consequence of treating the current situation at the border as an unprecedented crisis -- which Nielsen's DHS, as well as the White House, has made a concerted effort to do.

• Aja Romano: The fight to save net neutrality, explained: "Congress or the courts could still save net neutrality -- but don't get your hopes up." Important piece, originally written in December 2017 and newly updated.

• Dylan Scott: The 6 most interesting parts of Trump's mostly disappointing drug price plan. I don't see anything here that fundamentally changes the pharmaceutical industry, with a couple things that could conceivably make their predation worse (e.g., "Allow certain Part D drugs to be priced differently based on different uses "). Most ominous is: "Undertake some vaguely defined changes to US trade policy to try to address the disparity between what the US pays for drugs and what other countries pay" -- i.e., get other countries to pay more for American drugs than current negotiated prices. This has actually been a long running trade agreement strategy, as US has always been willing to trade manufacturing jobs to coax other countries into paying more "intellectual property" rents. That's why the deals have often turned out to be lose-lose propositions for American workers.

  More on drug prices/profits:

  • Sarah Kliff: The true story of America's sky-high prescription drug prices. Well, mostly true. Kliff assumes that private pharmaceutical companies have to make profits in order to attract investments to develop new drugs. That's only sort of the way it works now: drug companies spend a lot more money on things like marketing than they do on r&d. Moreover, their r&d expenses are targeted on things with the highest return, not necessarily on the greatest need. For instance, an expensive continuing term treatment for a widespread problem like cholesterol or inflammation is better for business than a cure for a rare condition. On the other hand, a lot of medical research is already funded by government, and more would be even more effective -- not least because information can be shared, instead of hiding it in closed, competitive corporate labs. One can even negotiate a treaty whereby (virtually) all nations agree to invest a minimum amount to produce treatments that everyone can use. (That would answer Kliff's argument that US companies, motivated by undoubted greed, produce a disproportionate amount of the world's cures -- not that I'm sure that's even true.)

  • Paul Krugman: What's Good for Pharma Isn't Good for America (Wonkish).

  • Dylan Scott: The blockbuster fight over this obscure federal program explains America's drug prices: All about 340B.

• Emily Stewart: Trump taps private equity billionaire for intelligence advisory role: Stephen Feinberg, co-CEO of Cerberus Capital, which owns shadowy defense contractor DynCorp -- one of their big cash cows was training the Afghan police force. Stephen Witt wrote a profile back last July: Stephen Feinberg, the private military contractor who has Trump's ear.

• Todd VanDerWerff: The rise of the American news desert: "Predominantly white rural areas supported Trump. They also often lack robust local media." Sees local media as "a necessary counterbalance to national narratives," and notes that:

  The slow death of local media has contributed to the epistemic closure in conservative circles, especially in rural areas. That's led to the proliferation of so-called "fake news" stories, widely spread on Facebook, which are sometimes outright untrue and sometimes just a hugely misleading presentation of a true news story.

  No one has been sure how to puncture that conservative media bubble, to combat the narratives that lots of rural white voters have come to believe are true. It's impossible to contradict fake news with "real news" when the sources offering that real news aren't trusted.

  But local media outlets, which used to carry that sort of clout within their communities, are being economically strangled by an environment that increasingly requires turning to nationally syndicated programs and stories, rather than the sort of local focus that used to mark these outlets. . . .

  Conservatives have spent decades effectively discrediting the national media among their partisans. But that effort wouldn't have been as effective if there weren't space for it to flourish, in places where local news organizations have been strangled or cut to the bone.

  My first thought was that there is a national media desert as well, but then I thought of cable news and it started looking more like a jungle, where constant fear of snakes and spiders and the inability to see more than a few feet makes it impossible to grasp what's really going on.

• Alex Ward: Pompeo: US and North Korea "in complete agreement" on goals of Trump-Kim summit: Of course, nobody know what he thinks he's talking about. The article posits a series of steps by North Korea (along with "robust verification," etc.), each to be followed by some sort of "reward" (mostly in the form of reduced sanctions) for their good behavior. That doesn't sound like a very fair deal to me, which matters because stable deals need to be based on mutual respect and fairness, not on who can apply the most pressure. Moreover, Ward buys into the company line that:

  North Korea has also historically been a very tough country to negotiate with, in large part because it routinely breaks the deals it agrees to. The US and other countries have been trying to come to a diplomatic, negotiated agreement with North Korea over its nuclear program since 1985. It's broken its commitments multiple times with the US, including walking out on a denuclearization deal in 2009.

  My impression is that the US is the one who has repeatedly sabotaged the various talks with North Korea (see, e.g., Six-party talks, which started in 2003 and ended without agreement in 2009). What's always been lacking has been American willingness to normalize relations with North Korea. Maybe Trump and Kim realize that's the only possible deal, and maybe they understand that neither country can afford to continue the impasse. Still, Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal should be proof that the US cannot be trusted to keep its promises.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, April 29, 2018

Big story of the week is the optimistic meet up between Korea's two leaders, or at least it would be if we actually knew the story. Most American foreign policy pundits have been working overtime to diminish our hopes, and Trump's glib sunniness (with ominous "we'll see" asides) isn't very reassuring. Fred Kaplan tries to sort this out (see What Is Denuclearization Anyway?:

As has been clear from the moment the subject came up, one obstacle to a successful summit is that both leaders are going into it with conflicting premises. Kim thinks Trump is caving to the reality of a North Korean nuclear arsenal; Trump thinks Kim is caving to the pressure of U.S. sanctions and threats. Both are probably right to some degree, but it's hard to see how the talks can produce a lasting peace if each man thinks that he has the upper hand at the outset and that, therefore, any deal must be struck on his terms.

Trump seems glued to this delusion. On Sunday, after watching MSNBC's Chuck Todd question whether Trump had received anything in return after handing Kim "the huge gift" of agreeing to meet with him in the first place, Trump tweeted: "Wow, we haven't given up anything & they have agreed to denuclearization (so great for World), site closure, & no more testing!"

Trump was referring to news reports of a speech that Kim had given the day before. But an official record of the speech, delivered at a plenary meeting of the Workers' Party of Korea, reveals that Kim agreed to no such thing.

Rather, Kim said that no further tests of nuclear weapons or medium-to-long-range ballistic missiles "are necessary" (italics added), given that North Korea has "successfully concluded" the process of building a nuclear arsenal. And because of this completion, Kim went on, "the overall situation is rapidly changing in favor of the Korean revolution" -- i.e., in favor of North Korea's triumph.

This is very different from a conciliatory gesture to stop testing. As for closing his nuclear test site, it appears that the site was slated for a shutdown already, having been gutted by the spate of recent weapons tests.

Finally, contrary to the early news reports about the speech, Kim said nothing in the speech about denuclearization. In fact, he described his nuclear arsenal as "a powerful treasured sword for defending peace."

Kaplan also notes that Kim has little reason to trust US pledges on denuclearization: both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi shut down their nuclear programs to appease the US and got toppled anyway. Iran did the same, and while they haven't been overthrown Trump and Pompeo are now saying they will scotch the deal while encouraging Israel and Saudi Arabia to attack Iranians in Syria and supposed proxies in Syria and Yemen. He didn't mention the agreement Jimmy Carter negotiated with North Korea in the 1990s, which Clinton and Bush reneged on, leading North Korea to resume its since-completed work on nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, it's just possible this time that Trump and co. will be pushed out of the driver's seat on negotiations. South Korea has the power to make its own deal, and the US would find it impossible to keep troops in South Korea without permission. South Korea could also blow a huge hole in the US sanctions regime, and those are the two main issues for North Korea -- probably enough to get the North to mothball (but not totally dismantle) its rockets and nuclear warheads, to open up trade and normalize diplomatic relations. Given how gloomy the "military option" is -- a point I'm sure Mattis and DOD have made many times -- that may not even be such a bitter pill for Trump.

America's ability to dictate to its allies has been slipping for decades, but Trump's "America first" agenda accelerates the decline. For instance, one reason South Korea has long been a willing client was that the US was willing to run large trade deficits to help build up the South Korean economy. Trump, before he got so excited with his "fire & fury" and "little Rocket Man" tweets, started by pulling the US out of TPP, criticizing bilateral trade agreements with South Korea, and demanding the South (and everyone from NATO to Japan) to pick up more of their own defense tabs. All these signs point out that the US is becoming a less reliable and cost-effective ally, and as such will continue to lose influence.

More links on Korea:

• Zaid Jilani/Jon Schwarz: For Donald Trump to succeed with North Korea, he'll need a pragmatic definition of "denuclearization"

• Fred Kaplan: More Than Just a Handshake? "The genuinely inspiring Korea summit sets Trump up for a major diplomatic breakthrough -- if he can ignore his own instincts."

• Choe Sang-Hun: Kim Prepared to Cede Nuclear Weapons if U.S. Pledges Not to Invade.

• Matt Shuham: Raising Eyebrows, Bolton Says US Has 'Libya Model' in Mind for North Korea: Lots of things can screw up peace talks with North Korea, but here Bolton claims the head of the list. You may recall that Bolton had a hand in the 2003 Libya deal, where Gadhafi gave up a nuclear program that hadn't made any progress, and paid a mountain of cash to settle claims over the Lockerbie airliner bombing 15 years earlier -- only to have the US later bomb his country again, deposing and killing Gadhafi.

• Peter Van Buren: What if Kim Jong-un is Looking to Liberalize?

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The 4 biggest stories of the week, explained: Kim Jong Un crossed the DMZ; Bill Cosby is guilty; Ronny Jackson will not be VA secretary; Mike Pompeo was confirmed as secretary of state. Other Yglesias posts:

  • Why politicians should promise every American a job.

  • Ronny Jackson is flagrantly unqualified, even if all the allegations against him are false. Jackson subsequently withdrew. Other links:

    • Sarah Kliff: The real Ronny Jackson scandal.

    • Emily Stewart: Trump calls for Jon Tester to resign over Ronny Jackson saga on Twitter.

    By the way, one thing I've learned from the Jackson fiasco that I didn't realize before is that Veterans Affairs is the second largest cabinet department in the federal government. I would have guessed Homeland Security, or before it was formed HEW or HUD, but I probably should have known better. We've been at war ever since 2001, and the toll adds up. Indeed, long-term Veterans costs were a big part of the multi-trillion dollar cost-of-war price tags that Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have been calculating. And veterans also enjoy a degree of bipartisan support that HEW and HUD don't (although many Republicans would like to subject more veterans to private sector profiteering, so you have to wonder what kind of friends they really are).

  • Democrats just flipped a state Assembly district in New York.

  • Donald Trump's potential pardon of Jack Johnson, explained.

• Peter Beinart: American Jews Have Abandoned Gaza -- and the Truth. Also: Eric Levitz: Natalie Portman and the Crisis of Liberal Zionism.

• Walker Bragman/Michael Sainato: The Democratic Party is paying millions for Hillary Clinton's email list, FEC documents show.

• Masha Gessen: What James Comey and Donald Trump Have in Common: Title forces a point that isn't really born out in the article. True enough, both have a single-minded focus -- Comey on truth and Trump on loyalty -- to which they sacrifice any shred of human compassion.

  Part of Comey's zeal is prosecutorial: he headed an agency that loves to punish people for the coverup rather than the crime. For Comey, this is principle rather than method. As a U.S. attorney, he writes, he made sure that Martha Stewart went to jail -- not, he stresses, because she engaged in insider trading of a kind that would have warranted but a warning, but because she lied about it. As the F.B.I. director, he hoped that his agents would catch Hillary Clinton in a lie about her e-mail servers. By this time, investigators had concluded that the use of Clinton's private server had caused no damage, but Comey makes it clear that his primary concern and objective was to catch the former Secretary of State in a lie. The pursuit of the prosecutable lie has been a cornerstone of F.B.I. strategy, especially in its post-2001 incarnation as an anti-terrorism agency, and Comey wastes no time reflecting on its tenuous relationship to actual crime, or actual justice.

• Jonathan Greenberg: Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes. One of Trump's earliest scams: his campaign to get his name on the Forbes 400 list, including a guest appearance by Trump's "personal lawyer" Roy Cohn (you surely didn't think that Michael Cohen was the sleaziest lawyer in Trump's stable?). For more on Cohn, see: Frank Rich: The Original Donald Trump:

  For years it's been a parlor game for Americans to wonder how history might have turned out if someone had stopped Lee Harvey Oswald before he shot JFK. One might be tempted -- just as fruitlessly -- to speculate on what might have happened if more of New York's elites had intervened back then, nonviolently, to block or seriously challenge Trump's path to power. They had plenty of provocation and opportunities to do so. Trump practiced bigotry on a grand scale, was a world-class liar, and ripped off customers, investors, and the city itself. Yet for many among New York's upper register, there was no horror he could commit that would merit his excommunication. As with Cohn before him, the more outrageously and reprehensibly Trump behaved, the more the top rungs of society were titillated by him. They could cop out of any moral judgments or actions by rationalizing him as an entertaining con man: a cheesy, cynical, dumbed-down Gatsby who fit the city's tacky 1980s Gilded Age much as F. Scott Fitzgerald's more romantic prototype had the soigné Jazz Age of the 1920s. And so most of those who might have stopped Trump gawked like the rest of us as he scrambled up the city's ladder, grabbing anything that wasn't nailed down.

• Mike Konczal: Actually, Guns Do Kill People: "The research is now clear: Right-to-carry laws increase the rate of violent crime."

• Paul Krugman: We Don't Need No Education: Trying to explain the wave of teacher strikes in Red States, he focuses on money:

  So what happens when hard-line conservatives take over a state, as they did in much of the country after the 2010 Tea Party wave? They almost invariably push through big tax cuts. Usually these tax cuts are sold with the promise that lower taxes will provide a huge boost to the state economy.

  This promise is, however, never -- and I mean never -- fulfilled; the right's continuing belief in the magical payoff from tax cuts represents the triumph of ideology over overwhelming negative evidence.

  What tax cuts do, instead, is sharply reduce revenue, wreaking havoc with state finances. For a great majority of states are required by law to balance their budgets. This means that when tax receipts plunge, the conservatives running many states can't do what Trump and his allies in Congress are doing at the federal level -- simply let the budget deficit balloon. Instead, they have to cut spending.

  And given the centrality of education to state and local budgets, that puts schoolteachers in the cross hairs.

  How, after all, can governments save money on education? They can reduce the number of teachers, but that means larger class sizes, which will outrage parents. They can and have cut programs for students with special needs, but cruelty aside, that can only save a bit of money at the margin. The same is true of cost-saving measures like neglecting school maintenance and scrimping on school supplies to the point that many teachers end up supplementing inadequate school budgets out of their own pockets.

  That's all true enough, and probably most of the story, but leaves out some particularly nasty partisan calculations. Republicans have long viewed teachers' unions as a political liability, and as such have wanted to hurt them. Indeed, much of their fondness for charter schools (and vouchers for private schools) is rooted in union-busting. More recently, some Republicans (Rick Santorum was an early adopter) have started to question the value of education at all -- pointing out that liberal arts education tends toward liberal politics, playing into a tradition of anti-intellectualism that was history when Richard Hofstadter wrote about it fifty years ago, yet seems to reinvent every time elites need to find political suckers. At the same time, elite (and later public) colleges have shifted from scholarships -- which helped smart-but-poor students like Clinton and Obama find comfortable homes in the ruling class -- to debt, trying to preserve elite jobs for the scions of the upper class.

  When mass education first became a popular idea among elites, back in the mid-19th century, it was seen as a way to socialize immigrants, to fold them into American society and its growing economy, but it also represented opportunity and upward mobility and justice. We no longer live in a world which looks forward to its future. Rather, the rich are entrenching themselves in fortresses (both literally and figuratively), hoping to blight out everyone else.

• Nomi Prins: The Return of the Great Meltdown? Wrote one of the better books about the 2008 crash (It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals From Washington to Wall Street), but looking at Trump's recent Fed appointees and the Republican effort to unwind Dodd-Frank, she's anticipating a rerun in her new book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World. Also on TomDispatch, Todd Miller: An Unsustainable World Managed With an Iron Fist, on the militarization of the border with Mexico. Miller, too, has a book: Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security.

• Alex Ross: How American Racism Influenced Hitler: Takes off from James Q. Whitman's recent book, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. What could be made clearer is that there were two American models (not unrelated but distinct in our minds) for Hitler: the "Jim Crow" laws which codified a racial hierarchy, which South Africa adapted for Apartheid and could easily be adapted to discriminate against Jews; and "Manifest Destiny," the umbrella for driving Native Americans off their lands and into tiny, impoverished reservations, while killing off enough to constitute a cumulative genocide. As Ian Kershaw describes Hitler:

  His two abiding obsessions were violent anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. As early as 1921, he spoke of confining Jews to concentration camps, and in 1923 he contemplated -- and, for the moment, rejected -- the idea of killing the entire Jewish population. The Holocaust was the result of a hideous syllogism: if Germany were to expand into the East, where millions of Jews lived, those Jews would have to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with them.

  I have often thought that Hitler's quotes about how America dealt with its native population should be pursued at great length. Ross cites two books that do this: Carroll Kakel's The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (2011, Palgrave Macmillan), and Edward B. Westermann's Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (2016, University of Oklahoma Press).

  America's knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be "our Mississippi," he said. "Europe -- and not America -- will be the land of unlimited possibilities." Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands -- tens of millions of them -- would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels's less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

  Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler's regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy -- an "everybody does it" justification for Nazi policies.

• Micah Zenko: America's First Reality TV War: "The Trump administration's latest missile strikes in Syria were never going to accomplish anything. But the show must go on."

• Neri Zilber: Israel and Iran's escalating shadow war in Syria, explained: Not really explained, in that the author fails to emphasize that Israel is the one provoking further escalations. Also, there is no real chance of this developing into a conventional ground war. Sure, both sides have missiles that can reach the other, but Israel has a distinct advantage there: nuclear warheads. There's no reason to doubt that Iran has any reason for stationing military forces in Syria other than for supporting the Assad regime, which Israel has never regarded as a serious threat (at least since 1979, when Israel signed a separate peace deal with Egypt, precluding any future alliance). Israel, on the other hand, has periodically bombed Syria even before the Civil War gave them cover. They regard Iranian troops as an unacceptable provocation because they might inconvenience Israeli air strikes. And also, quite significantly, because Israel recognizes it can take advantage of American prejudices against Iran to push its alliance militarily. For evidence this is working, see Carol Morello: Pompeo says U.S. is with Israel in fight against Iran. Pompeo is also anxious for the US to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, which is up for renewal on May 12. Among other preposterous things, he claims that North Korea won't be bothered if the US breaks its word on a similar deal. In the past, North Koreans have often pointed to Libya, which agreed to dismantle its nuclear program only to have the US bomb the country and kill its leader, leaving chaos in its wake, so there only seem to be two possible explanations for Pompeo's indifference: either he has totally unreasonable expectations about North Korea's willingness to disarm themselves, or he's looking to undermine any possible Korea deal. Given his neocon credentials, one suspects the latter. Meanwhile, the purpose of the Israel trip (with side trips to Riyadh and Amman) seems to be to stoke anti-Iran feeling before Trump drops out of the Iran deal.

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Sunday, April 22, 2018

Another week where I ran out of time before I ran out of links. Indeed, one I couldn't get to is Chris Bertram: Is there too much immigration? I also noticed that John Quiggin has been publishing chapters to his forthcoming book Economics in Two Lessons on Crooked Timber.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that mattered this week, explained: Michael Cohen had some fun in court; A baby went to the Senate floor (Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth's); Democrats got some good news in Senate polling; Mike Pompeo took a secret trip to North Korea. Other Yglesias posts:

  • There's no good alternative to building more homes in expensive cities.

  • Trump tweets: "The crime rate in California is high enough." California is a safer-than-average state. Trump thinks more immigrants, more crime, but opposite is true.

  • 11 House Republicans call for prosecutions of Clinton, Comey, Lynch, and others: The most charitable explanation is that the call is just meant "to try to muddy the waters in the media," but I should note that in some countries (e.g., Brazil and Russia) prosecuting political enemies has moved beyond the drawing board. I'm sure we could come up with a matching list of Bush cronies who Obama neglected to prosecute (although his DOJ did go after John Edwards). Still, prosecuting prosecutors for failing to prosecute cases that no reasonable person would view as winnable (n.b., the Edwards and Menendez cases failed), is pretty extreme.

  • James Comey isn't the hero we deserve. But he's the hero we need. The gist of Yglesias' argument is here:

    But to react to Comey's charges against Trump with a comprehensive assessment of his entire career is to miss the point. James Comey is a critical figure of our time not because of any particular decision, right or wrong, that he made during his tenure in government. He's important because he exemplifies values -- most of all, the pursuit of institutional independence and autonomy -- whose presence among career officials safeguards the United States against the threat of systemic corruption.

    The greatest safeguard we have against the dangers of Trump's highly personalized style of leadership and frequently expressed desire to reshape all institutions to serve his personal goal is that officials and bureaucrats have the power to say no. Comey, whatever else he did, said no to his boss and was fired for his trouble. America needs more government officials who are willing to take that stand. In many ways, Comey is not the hero the United States deserves. But in a critical moment, he may be the hero we need.

    Still, further down in the article Yglesias gives a pretty chilling account about Comey's prosecutorial mindset and institutional loyalties. Comey, for instance, holds up his prosecution of Martha Stewart (for "covering up a crime she didn't commit") as exemplary: "the Comey view is that true justice is treating Martha Stewart just as shabbily as the cops would treat anyone else." Also:

    Comey's handling of the 2016 campaign was essentially in the tradition of FBI directors acting on behalf of their agency's institutional goals. Knowing that the Obama administration was reluctant to fight publicly with the FBI over the matter while congressional Republicans were relatively eager, he slanted his decision-making on both the Russia and email investigations toward the interests of the GOP. As Adam Serwer writes, "the FBI is petrified of criticism from its conservative detractors, and is relatively indifferent to its liberal critics." And over the course of 2016, it showed -- when Mitch McConnell wanted Comey to keep quiet about Trump and Russia, he did. When Trump-friendly elements among the rank and file wanted him to speak up about Anthony Weiner's laptop, he did.

    On Comey, also see: Matt Taibbi: James Comey, the Would-Be J. Edgar Hoover. On the FBI's use of its own power to cover its own ass, see: Alice Speri: The FBI's race problems are getting worse. The prosecution of Terry Albury is proof. By the way, shouldn't the Espionage Act be reserved for disclosing secrets to foreign governments? Albury's "crime" was leaking documents to the press (i.e., the American people).

  • Richard Cohen's privilege, explained: Long-time Washington Post columnist, known for courageously standing up against "too much diversity" and complaints about the "privilege" enjoyed by white males like himself. I find much talk about "privilege" annoying myself, but then I don't sit on his perch ("and because the demographic of put-upon older white men does, in fact, exert disproportionate influence over American social and economic institutions, there continues to be a well-compensated and not very taxing job for him into his late 70s"). Yglesias provides some back story, but doesn't mention that Alex Pareene featured Cohen in his annual "hack lists" at Salon (tried to find a link but got blocked by Salon's "ad blocker" blocker -- probably why I stopped reading them, although I had less reason to when their better writers left).

  • Richard Clarinda and Michelle Bowman, Trump's new Fed appointees, explained: "Two boring, competent, well-qualified, industry-friendly picks."

  • Donald Trump's corruption means he'll never be a "normal" commander in chief: Mostly about Syria, more generally the Middle East, where Trump has numerous business entanglements. "We don't know who's paying Trump -- or whom he listens to."

  • Comey interview: "I thought David Petraeus should have been prosecuted".

• Zack Beauchamp: Syria exposes the core feature of Trump's foreign policy: contradiction: Many aspects of Trump's foreign policy are mired in contradiction (or at least incoherence), but it seems unfair to single out Syria as a Trump problem. Ever since the civil war there started it has been a multifaceted affair. Since US foreign policy has long been driven by kneejerk reactions, even under the much more rational Obama the US found itself opposing both Assad and his prime opponents in ISIS, leading to a policy which can only be described as nihilism. What Trump added to this fever swamp of contradictions was sympathy for pro-Assad Russia and antipathy for pro-Assad Iran. Meanwhile, America's two main allies in the region (Israel and Turkey) have each doubled down on their own schizophrenic involvements.

• Amy Chozick: 'They Were Never Going to Let Me Be President': Excerpt from Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling, yet another journalist's campaign chronicle, a reminder of how pathetic her obsession turned out to be. Not clear who "they" were in the title, other than the American people, but had she really understood that truth, why did she run in the first place? Why, given the inevitability of defeat, did she keep us from nominating a candidate who actually could have defeated Donald Trump? I doubt that Chozick has any such answers. Instead, we find her apologizing for getting caught up in such distractions as parsing John Podesta's hacked emails instead of seeing the broader context, not least that the email dump was timed to take attention away from the leak of Trump bragging about assaulting women ("grab them by the pussy").

• Robert Fisk: The search for truth in the rubble of Douma -- and one doctor's doubts over the chemical attack; also Patrick Cockburn: We Should be Sceptical of Those Who Claim to Know the Events in Syria: Of course, Trump jumped at the opportunity to bomb Syria before anyone really verified that reports of a chemical weapons attack were true. That is, after all, how American presidents prove their manhood.

• Steve Fraser: Teaching America a Lesson: About the national effort to forget that class was ever a concept rooted in reality. From Fraser's new book, Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion (Yale University Press). Also at TomDispatch: Tom Engelhardt: A Tale of American Hubris.

• Zachary Fryer-Biggs: Rudy Giuliani is Trump's new lawyer. His history with Comey could spell trouble.

• William Greider: American Hubris, or, How Globalization Brought Us Donald Trump: Unpack this a bit: "It was 'free trade' mania, pushed by both major political parties, that destroyed working-class prosperity and laid the groundwork for his triumph." Unpack that some more, why don't you? What made "free trade" such a problem was decline in union power, especially due to a politically rigged union-free zone in the US South, combined with decreasing domestic investments in infrastructure and education (also politically engineered), plus growing pressure on the rich to seek new sources of wealth abroad. To blame all of that on "free trade" confuses mechanism with cause. Trump benefited not from free trade so much as from that confusion. More importantly, Democratic politicians suffered because it looked like they had sold out their base to rich donors. (As, indeed, they had.) Note that The Nation has another piece this week with the same pitch line: Michael Massing: How Martin Luther Paved the Way for Donald Trump. It's as if they wanted to make the leap from tragedy to farce in a single issue. In an infinite universe, I guess you'll eventually find that everything leads to Donald Trump. That's a lot of inevitability for a guy who only got 46.1% of the vote.

• Umair Irfan/Eliza Barclay: 7 things we've learned about Earth since the last Earth Day: i.e., in the last year.

• Jen Kirby: Mike Pompeo reportedly met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: This is less interesting than the bilateral talks between North and South Korea, which actually seem to be getting somewhere, but does indicate that the planned summit between Trump and Kim may actually come to pass. Past efforts to bridge differences between the US and DPRK have generally been sabotaged by mid-level US staff -- one recalls the frantic efforts of Sandy Berger and others to derail Jimmy Carter's mid-1990s agreement. One might expect a neocon like Pompeo to throw a few monkey wrenches into the efforts, and indeed he may still, but it's also clear that Mattis and the DOD have no appetite for launching a war against North Korea, so maybe it's not such a bad idea to negotiate a little. Also see: Robin Wright: With Pompeo to Pyongyang, the U.S. Launches Diplomacy with North Korea.

  Wright also wrote: The Hypocrisy of Trump's "Mission Accomplished" Boast About Syria. Actually, Trump is establishing a track record of acting tough and making flamboyant and reckless threats then pulling his punches. It's sort of the opposite of Theodore Roosevelt's maxim to "speak softly and carry a big stick" -- only sort of, because he has expanded the murderous drone program, encourage Saudi Arabia to escalate their bombing of Yemen, sent more troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, so it's clear that he has no respect for world peace or human life. Moreover, his pugnacious stance is making the world more dangerous in many ways, not least by the contempt he projects on the rest of the world (and on a good many Americans).

• Noah Kulwin: The Internet Apologizes . . . Picture shows a weeping cat, with a couple of tweets from "The Internet": "We're sorry. We didn't mean to destroy privacy. And democracy. Our bad."

  Why, over the past year, has Silicon Valley begun to regret the foundational elements of its own success? The obvious answer is November 8, 2016. For all that he represented a contravention of its lofty ideals, Donald Trump was elected, in no small part, by the internet itself. Twitter served as his unprecedented direct-mail-style megaphone, Google helped pro-Trump forces target users most susceptible to crass Islamophobia, the digital clubhouses of Reddit and 4chan served as breeding grounds for the alt-right, and Facebook became the weapon of choice for Russian trolls and data-scrapers like Cambridge Analytica. Instead of producing a techno-utopia, the internet suddenly seemed as much a threat to its creator class as it had previously been their herald.

  Fifth years ago I wouldn't have had a moment's hesitation as to the problem here: capitalism. That may seem like a quaint, old-fashioned analysis -- even I would be more inclined these days to speak of market failures and distortions -- but it's basically true and was totally predictable from the onset. For instance, the very first time I heard of WWW it was in the context of a question: how can we make money off of this? Sure, people may have had trouble imagining how pervasive, how all-consuming, it would be. And it may not have been obvious how few companies would wind up monopolizing such a huge slice of traffic. But from the start, every business plan imagined monopoly rents -- Microsoft's picked up their favored term ("vig") from the Mafia -- at the end of the rainbow. As practically everyone realized, the key to the fortune would be what economists called "network effects" -- hence every serious contender started off by offering something for free, figuring on hooking you first, eating you later. Had we been smarter, we might have placed some roadblocks in their way: antitrust, privacy regulations, free software, publicly funded alternatives. But that wasn't the American Way, especially in the post-Cold War glow of capitalist triumphalism. One great irony here is that while right-wingers like to complain about popularly elected government "picking winners and losers" in free markets, the reality is that the not-so-free markets are deciding who wins our supposedly free elections.

  After the intro, the article moves on to "How It Went Wrong, in 15 Steps," through the words of 14 "Architects" -- a mix of techies and businessfolk. The 15 steps:

  1. Start With Hippie Good Intentions . . .
  2. Then mix in capitalism on steroids.
  3. The arrival of Wall Streeters didn't help . . .
  4. . . . And we paid a high price for keeping it free.
  5. Everything was designed to be really, really addictive.
  6. At first it worked -- almost too well.
  7. No one from Silicon Valley was held accountable . . .
  8. . . . Even as social networks became dangerous and toxic.
  9. . . . And even as they invaded our privacy.
  10. Then came 2016. [Donald Trump and Brexit]
  11. Employees are starting to revolt.
  12. To fix it, we'll need a new business model . . .
  13. . . . And some tough regulation.
  14. Maybe nothing will change.
  15. . . . Unless, at the very least, some new people are in charge.

  Useful, although one could imagine alternative ways of threading the analysis. Step 12, for instance, says "we'll need a new business model," then offers: "Maybe by trying something radical and new -- like charging users for goods and services." New? That's the way thousands of exclusive newsletters aimed at business already work. What makes them viable is a small audience willing to pay a high premium for information. You could switch to this model overnight by simply banning advertising. The obvious major effect is that it would cause a major collapse in utility and usage. There would be a lot of other problems as well -- more than I can possibly list here. Still, true that you need a new business model. But perhaps we should consider ones that aren't predicated on capitalist greed and a vastly inequal society?

  The article also includes a useful list of "Things That Ruined the Internet":

  • Cookies (1994)
  • The Farmville vulnerability (2007) [a Facebook design flaw that made possible the Cambridge Analytica hack]
  • Algorithmic sorting (2006) ["it keeps users walled off in their own personalized loops"]
  • The "like" button (2009)
  • Pull-to-refresh (2009)
  • Pop-up ads (1996)

  I would have started the list with JavaScript, which lets website designers take over your computer and control your experience. It is the technological layer enabling everything else on the list (except cookies).

  Speaking of alternate business models, Kulwin also did an interview with Katherine Maher about "Wikipedia's nonprofit structure and what incentive-based media models lack": 'There Is No Public Internet, and We Are the Closest Thing to It'.

• David Leonhardt: A Time for Big Economic Ideas: For the last forty years, the Republican "small government" mantra has sought to convince us that we can't do things that help raise everyone's standard of living, indeed that we can't afford even to do things that government has done since the 1930s. On the other hand, they've pushed the line that markets rigged so the rich get richer is the best we can hope for. And they've been so successful that even Leonhardt, trying to reverse the argument, doesn't come close to really thinking big. One of my favorite books back fifty years ago was Paul Goodman's Utopian Essays & Practical Proposals. A while back I opened up a book draft file with that as a subtitle. Haven't done much on it yet, but not for lack of big ideas.

• German Lopez: The Senate's top Democrat just came out for ending federal marijuana prohibition: Chuck Shumer, who has a bill to that effect (as does Cory Booker). Lopez also wrote: John Boehner just came out for marijuana reform. Most Republicans agree. Being a Republican, Boehner did more than accede to public opinion. He figured out a way to get paid for doing so. I'm reminded of gambling, which when I was growing up was regarded as one of the worst sources of moral rot anywhere. However, as it became the fount of several Republican-leaning fortunes, the guardians of our moral virtue learned to embrace it. Indeed, lotteries have become a major source of tax revenues in many states (especially here in Kansas).

• Andrew Prokop: Andrew McCabe's criminal referral, explained: This may give second thoughts to some of the people who ponied up a half-million bucks to help McCabe sue for his pension and other possible damages from his politically motivated firing. Still, this doesn't seem like much of a criminal case. The charge is that "McCabe lacked candor about his role in leaks about a Clinton investigation." The leak was one designed to correct a report that he wasn't being tough enough on Clinton. Clearly, whatever McCabe was, he wasn't a partisan Democratic mole in the FBI. On the other hand, his new friends probably figure that any lawsuit that forces the government to expose documents is bound to turn up something embarrassing for Trump and Sessions.

  Prokop also wrote: The DNC just sued Russia and the Trump campaign for 2016 election meddling. Hard to see what the value of this suit is, as it is critically dependent on on-going (and far from complete) investigations to establish linkage between the various parties. Moreover, I have two fairly large reservations. One is that I don't generally approve of using US courts to sue over foreign jurisdictions, especially cases highly tainted with prejudice. (The 9/11 lawsuits are an example.) The other is that I see this as a time-and-money sink for the Democrats, at a time when they have more important things to focus on: winning elections in 2018 and 2020. For more on the lawsuit, see: Glenn Greenwald/Trevor Timm: The DNC's lawsuit against WikiLeaks poses a serious threat to press freedom:

  The DNC's suit, as it pertains to WikiLeaks, poses a grave threat to press freedom. The theory of the suit -- that WikiLeaks is liable for damages it caused when it "willfully and intentionally disclosed" the DNC's communications (paragraph 183) -- would mean that any media outlet that publishes misappropriated documents or emails (exactly what media outlets quite often do) could be sued by the entity or person about which they are reporting, or even theoretically prosecuted for it, or that any media outlet releasing an internal campaign memo is guilty of "economic espionage" (paragraph 170):

  This is effectively the same point Trump tried to make during his 2016 campaign when he argued that libel laws should be passed which would allow aggrieved parties like himself to sue for damages. Indeed, throughout his career Trump has been plagued by leaks and hacks (i.e., journalism). You'd think that the DNC would appreciate that we need more free press, not less. Makes it look like they (still) prefer to work in the dark.

• Brian Resnick: Trump's next NASA administrator is a Republican congressman with no background in science: Jim Bridenstine, of Oklahoma, once ran the Air and Space Museum in Tulsa. Hope he realizes that unlike many government agencies, when/if he causes NASA to crash and burn it will be televised.

• Emily Stewart: Nobody knows who was behind half of the divisive ads on Facebook ahead of the 2016 election: Half were linked to "suspicious groups"; one-sixth of those were linked to Russia.

• Beyond Alt: The Extremely Reactionary, Burn-It-Down-Radical, Newfangled Far Right: A smorgasbord, written by a dozen or more writers with links to even more material. Certainly much more info than I ever wanted to know about the so-called alt-right. One aside mentions a symmetrical "alt-left," but notes that alt-leftists hate being called that. Right. We're leftists.

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Sunday, April 15, 2018

John Bolton started work as Trump's new National Security Adviser on Monday. On Friday, Trump ordered a massive missile attack on Syria. Those who warned about Bolton, like Fred Kaplan, have been vindicated very quickly. Presumably, what took Trump and Bolton so long was lining up British and French contributions to the fusillade, to make this look less like the act of a single madman and more like the continuation of a millennium of Crusader and Imperialist attacks on Syria. For a news report on the strike, long on rhetoric and short on damage assessment, see Helene Cooper, Thomas Gibbons-Neft, Ben Hubbard: U.S., Britain and France Strike Syria Over Suspected Chemical Weapons Attack. Two significant points here: (1) the targets were narrowly selected to represent Syria's alleged chemical weapons capability (which raises the question of why, if the US knew of these facilities before, it didn't insist on inspections under Syria's Russia-brokered agreement to give up its chemical weapons -- more rigorous inspections could have kept the alleged chemical attacks from ever happening, as well as saving Syria from "retaliatory" strikes); (2) the US and its cronies consider this round of strikes to be complete (Trump even used the phrase "Mission Accomplished" to describe them).

I suppose the good news here is that while Russia is unhappy about the strikes, Trump and Bolton (and "Mad Dog") have limited themselves to a level of aggression unlikely to trigger World War III. On the other hand, what Trump did was embrace one of the hoariest clichés of American politics: the notion that US presidents prove their mettle by unleashing punitive bombing strikes on nations incapable of defense or response. The first example I can recall was Reagan's bombing of Libya in 1986, although there were previous examples of White House tantrums, like Wilson sending Pershing's army into Mexico to chase down Pancho Villa in 1916-17. After Reagan, GHW Bush launched grudge wars against Panama and Iraq, but the art (and hubris) of bombing on a whim was more fully developed and exploited by Bill Clinton, especially in Iraq. Clinton got so much political mileage out of it that GW Bush bombed Iraq his first week in office, just to show that he could.

Still, what makes it a cliché is not just that other presidents have done it. People who play presidents on TV and in the movies do it also, if anything even more often and reflexively. I first noticed this in The West Wing -- I didn't watch much TV during its 1999-2006 run, but it seems like nearly every episode I did catch saw its otherwise reasonable President Bartlett ordering the bombing of someone or other. Just last week President Kirkman of Designated Survivor unleashed a rashly emotional attack on a fictional country based on even shoddier intelligence than Trump's. A couple weeks ago in Homeland the US bombed Syria against President Elizabeth Keane's orders, simply because her Chief of Staff thought it would provide some useful PR spin. When all of pop culture calls out for blood, not to mention advisers like Bolton, it's impossible to imagine someone like Donald Trump might get in their way.

The usual problem with clichés is that they're lazy, requiring little or no thought or ingenuity. Politicians are even more prone to clichés than writers, because they rarely run any risk saying whatever they're most expected to. Some people thought that Trump, with his brusque disregard for "political correctness," might be different, but they sadly overestimated his capacity for any form of critical thought. On the other hand, Washington is chock full of foreign policy mandarins trapped in the same web of clichés, even as it's long been evident that their plots and prescriptions don't come close to working. And nowhere have knee-jerk reactions been more obvious than with Syria, where America's effort to fight some and promote other anti-Assad forces is effectively nihilist. Rational people recoil from situations where there is no solution. Trump, on the other hand, takes charge.

Some more links on the fire this time in Syria:

• Moustafa Bayoumi: The Syria bombing is a disgraceful act disguised as a noble gesture.

• Phyllis Bennis: American Air Strikes in Syria Do Nothing to Further Justice for the Victims of the Attack on Douma.

• Marjorie Cohn: Trump's Rush to Judgment on Syrian Chemical Attack: Illegal and Deadly.

• Fred Kaplan: Will Assad "Get the Message" This Time?

• Ray McGovern: Attacking Syria: Thumbing Noses at Constitution and Law.

• Jon Schwarz: Donald Trump Ordered Syria Strike Based on a Secret Legal Justification Even Congress Can't See.

• JP Sottile: The Real Message Behind Trump's Syrian Strike.

• Zeeshan Aleem: Trump's America First media allies think he betrayed them with the Syria strike.

• Mairav Zonszein: John Bolton's Extremism Is Perfectly Aligned With the Most Bellicose Israeli Policies.

• Matt Taibbi: If We're on the Brink of War, the Fault Is Ours, Not Trump's or Bolton's: Pre-attack, but point is still valid: "They have an excuse -- they're stupid and crazy. What's ours?"

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that drove politics this week: House Speaker Paul Ryan is retiring from Congress; Mr. Zuckerberg went to Washington; The FBI raised Michael Cohen's office (doesn't he mean "raided"?); James Comey started promoting his book. The latter point mentions what I would have picked as a key story: the pardon for Scooter Libby -- one of the dozen or so most obnoxious things Trump has personally done so far. Perhaps even bigger is the latest Trump assault on Syria. While the missile launch occurred after Yglesias was done for the week, the PR pitch lurked over the entire week. Other Yglesias posts this week:

  • James Comey admits that his read of the polls may have influenced his handling of the Clinton email probe: Yglesias adds: "A damning admission." I'm inclined to take it more at face value, as (belated) recognition that he was letting his decisions be dictated by what he expected the perceived reactions might be. In particular, he was much more concerned about what Republicans might say had he done the normal thing and kept quiet about an ongoing investigation until the FBI had actually reviewed the evidence; and that he was completely clueless to how his rumor-mongering might affect the Democrats, the election, and the fate of the nation. And he reaches for the facile excuse that based on polls he expected Clinton to win anyway so he figured nothing he could do would change things, although what he did was the single most important factor in tilting the election toward Trump. Even today, Comey's claim to have acted even-handedly is tone deaf to the actual temper of the political divide. While he is forthright in condemning Trump, he manages to make himself look to Trump supporters like a hack spouting partisan rancor -- and therefore he's unlikely to convince anyone of anything other than their presuppositions.

    For more on the book, see: Jen Kirby: 5 eye-popping revelations from James Comey's book excerpts:

    1. Trump was obsessed with the so-called "pee tape"
    2. Comey has some things to say about Jeff Sessions
    3. Comey is airing his Trump grievances. Like, really airing them.
    4. Comey says the Trump administration reminded him of his days prosecuting the mob
    5. Comey defends his handling of the Clinton email investigation -- and makes it seem as if everyone else has absolved him too

    Also, not for me but maybe for you: Alex Ward: Why James Comey isn't the hero you think he is.

  • Donald Trump sold out to Paul Ryan, not the other way around.

  • John Kelly's diminished standing in the Trump administration, in one photo: Not actually the first time Kelly has been photographed with his hand over his face. Probably not the last either. The suggestion is that it's not true that Kelly has no sense of shame. More likely he just has no principles.

  • The RNC's new Lyin' Comey website, explained: One of the era's more cynical attempts at negative psychology.

    Interestingly, though, the Lyin' Comey site does not really dedicate much attention (if any) to rebutting anything in particular Comey said about Trump.

    Instead, its main focus is pointing out that between October 2016 and Comey's firing in May 2017, Democrats had a lot of mean things to say about him.

  • Mark Zuckerberg has been apologizing for reckless privacy violations since he was a freshman.

  • House Speaker Paul Ryan was the biggest fraud in American politics. Ryan's decision to give up his Congressional seat in 2018 has led to a lot of commentary, but this is the one key point -- reiterated in Paul Krugman: The Paul Ryan Story: From Flimflam to Fascism:

    Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. Can anyone name a single instance in which his supposed concern about the deficit made him willing to impose any burden on the wealthy, in which his supposed compassion made him willing to improve the lives of the poor? Remember, he voted against the Simpson-Bowles debt commission proposal not because of its real flaws, but because it would raise taxes and fail to repeal Obamacare.

    And his "deficit reduction" proposals were always frauds. The revenue loss from tax cuts always exceeded any explicit spending cuts, so the pretense of fiscal responsibility came entirely from "magic asterisks": extra revenue from closing unspecified loopholes, reduced spending from cutting unspecified programs. I called him a flimflam man back in 2010, and nothing he has done since has called that judgment into question.

    More on Ryan:

    • Dare Lind: Paul Ryan is leaving because he lost the fight for the Republican soul, and Dylan Matthews: Paul Ryan paved the way for Trump's takeover of the Republican Party: These two pieces seem at odds, each partly true, and neither all that right. I think Yglesias was more right: Trump bowed to Ryan on policy issues, not because he agreed with Ryan but because he doesn't understand problems well enough to argue. All Ryan had to do was to pay enough lip service to stay off Trump's enemies list, which he barely did.

    • Ella Nilsen: "IronStache" Randy Bryce on running in Wisconsin after Paul Ryan took himself out of the game.

    • William Rivers Pitt: As the Republican Roof Caves In, Paul Ryan Hits the Road.

    • Emily Stewart: Paul Ryan has no good answers for the balooning deficits that happened under his watch.

    For what it's worth, I think Ryan's decision makes sense on three counts: (1) Ryan is one of the most despised political figures in the nation right now, and in 2018 every Democrat running for the House is going to be running against Ryan (much as every Republican since 2010 has run against Nancy Pelosi); I'd bet that the Kochs have polling showing this liability, so they helped nudge him into backing out and trying to protect his brand for more opportune times; (2) after being Speaker, becoming Minority Leader is one of the shittiest jobs in US political life (sure, Pelosi did it, but QED); (3) I believe Ryan that he won't run for president in 2020, but someone is going to primary Trump, and if that results in a Trump exit or a contested convention Ryan wants to position himself as the compromise/unity choice -- the same strategy that got him the Speakership. Of course, he could just cash in and become a lobbyist, but his sponsors probably still think he still has a political future.

  • Scott Pruitt's ethics problems are conservative ideology in action. I was thinking of articulating this somewhat differently: that conservatives are exceptionally prone to corruption because they believe that private gain is more important than public welfare, and doubly so to the extent they're able to create a world where private wealth is the only source of future security. Yglesias' main point is "conservatives don't believe in the EPA's mission," which correlates with the idea that corruption is fine as one way to hobble a bureaucracy they don't want to work. For the case in point, any money Pruitt wastes on security and luxury travel and fancy furniture is money unavailable for enforcing clean air and water laws. Similarly, conservatives seek to direct funding away from welfare to defense, not because they so value defense but because money spent there almost never increases public welfare. And conservatives -- John Bolton is a good example -- favor foreign policies that increase risk and fear, because they promote greater defense spending.

  • The American Chopper Meme, explained. The Pruitt one near the end makes an interesting point.

  • The Bell Curve is about policy. And it's wrong. About Charles Murray, the reference to his 1994 book The Bell Curve, which attempted to salvage racism by using statistics rather than utterly discredited genetic claims. The most charitable interpretation one can make about Murray's data is that it shows that racial discrimination has been somewhat successful at disadvantaging blacks. Still, I'm surprised to see anyone bringing this lame horse up, especially after the book was thoroughly rebutted in Russell Jacoby/Naomi Glauberman, eds.: The Bell Curve Debate. Still, as Yglesias notes, Murray is still active, still spreading politically motivated nonsense, as much about class as race. I guess I shouldn't be so surprised. After all, if you're dumb enough to believe Trump is on your side, you're probably dumb enough to think Charles Murray is smart.

  • The case against Facebook. I can't say as I'm following either Facebook or the angst over it, but if you are, also see: Matt Taibbi: Can We Be Saved From Facebook? and Watching Facebook and Senate Hypocrisy in Real-Time.

• Tara Golshan: Trump is calling backsies on exiting the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal: Significantly, he's being lobbied by Republicans, especially from agricultural states.

• Umair Irfan: Scott Pruitt's actions at the EPA have triggered a half-dozen investigations. Also note that Pruitt's penchant for corruption preceded his move to Washington. See: Sharon Lerner: Why Did the EPA's Scott Pruitt Suppress a Report on Corruption in Oklahoma?

• Mark Kalin: List-Making as Resistance: Chronicling a Year of Damage Under Trump: Interview with Amy Siskind, author of The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump's First Year. Where most journalists have tried to make their living off Trump's Twitter feed, Siskind prefers to chronicle what's actually been happening. Doubt she's got it all -- the book is a mere 528 pages -- but it should be a good start. For an excerpt, see Amy Siskind: Yes, We Are Like Frogs in Boiling Water With Trump as President.

• Carolyn Kormann: Ryan Zinke's Great American Fire Sale.

• Paul Krugman: What's the Matter With Trumpland? Mostly true as far as he goes, but the key point isn't the liberal platitude that the most successful areas are those with the most educational opportunities and cultural attraction for educated workers (including immigrants). It's that declining areas have been making political choices that make their prospects even worse.

  That new Austin et al. paper makes the case for a national policy of aiding lagging regions. But we already have programs that would aid these regions -- but which they won't accept. Many of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the great bulk of the bill -- and would create jobs in the process -- are also among America's poorest.

  Or consider how some states, like Kansas and Oklahoma -- both of which were relatively affluent in the 1970s, but have now fallen far behind -- have gone in for radical tax cuts, and ended up savaging their education systems. External forces have put them in a hole, but they're digging it deeper.

  And when it comes to national politics, let's face it: Trumpland is in effect voting for its own impoverishment. New Deal programs and public investment played a significant role in the great postwar convergence; conservative efforts to downsize government will hurt people all across America, but it will disproportionately hurt the very regions that put the G.O.P. in power.

  I doubt it's disproportionate. After all, wealthier "blue states" have much more to lose, but it's certainly the case that nothing Trump and the Republicans will actually do will help to even out regional economic differences. Actually, we've been through this debate before. In the 1930s southern Democrats saw the New Deal as a way out of their impoverishment, but from about 1938 on most of the leading southern Democrats broke with Roosevelt, fearing that too much equality would upset their racial order, even if (perhaps even because) it raised living standards. Of course, they didn't reject all federal spending in their districts. They became the most ardent of cold warriors. (On the New Deal, see Ira Katznelson: Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. As for the cold warriors and their money train, James Byrne, John Stennis, and Carl Vinson were major figures.)

  Krugman also wrote Unicorns of the Intellectual Right, to remind us about the "intellectual decadence" and "moral decline" of right-leaning economists:

  In macroeconomics, what began in the 60s and 70s as a usefully challenging critique of Keynesian views went all wrong in the 80s, because the anti-Keynesians refused to reconsider their views when their own models failed the reality test while Keynesian models, with some modification, performed pretty well. By the time the Great Recession struck, the right-leaning side of the profession had entered a Dark Age, having retrogressed to the point where famous economists trotted out 30s-era fallacies as deep insights.

  But even among conservative economists who didn't go down that rabbit hole, there has been a moral collapse -- a willingness to put political loyalty over professional standards. We saw that most recently in the way leading conservative economists raced to endorse ludicrous claims for the efficacy of the Trump tax cuts, then tried to climb down without admitting what they had done. We saw it in the false claims that Obama had presided over a massive expansion of government programs and refusal to admit that he hadn't, the warnings that Fed policy would cause huge inflation followed by refusal to admit having been wrong, and on and on.

• German Lopez: Trump is already trying to call off his attorney general's war on marijuana.

• Alex Ward: Mike Pompeo, your likely new -- and Trump-friendly -- secretary of state: When Pompeo first ran for Congress, I had him pegged as a straight Koch plant with a quasi-libertarian economic focus, which I actually found preferable to his predecessor (Christian Fascist and Boeing flack Todd Tiahrt). However, his resume included a West Point education, and he soon emerged as a hardline neocon militarist. What brought him to Trump's attention was his demagogic flogging of Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi!!! pseudo-scandal. I can't imagine Trump nominating anyone who isn't "Trump-friendly," so I wouldn't get too agitated about that. Right now the problem with Pompeo isn't that he's simpatico with Trump; it's that his nomination shows that Trump is buying into Pompeo's neocon worldview -- although I'd also worry that Pompeo's tenure at CIA has made him even more contemptuous of law and diplomacy than he was before. Also see: Ryan Grim: Mike Pompeo Could Go Down if Senate Democrats Decide to Fight.

• Jennifer Williams: Trump just pardoned Scooter Libby: If you recall the case (way back in 2007), you'll recall that Libby was the only one convicted by a special prosecutor investigation into the politically motivated unmasking of a CIA agent -- an act that Libby doesn't seem to have been involved in, but Libby's perjury and obstruction prevented those actually guilty from ever being charged. At the time, GW Bush commuted Libby's three-year prison sentence, evidently afraid that if he didn't, Libby would switch sides and rat out other Bush operatives. Libby wound up paying a fine and spending two years on probation, but that's well in the past right now, so the pardon at this point barely affects Libby's life. So it's hard to read this as anything other than a blanket promise to his underlings that even if they do get caught up in his scandals and convicted, as long as they don't implicate Trump the president will protect them. It is, in other words, a very deliberate and public way of undermining the Mueller investigation. I'm not sure if it violates US law on obstruction of justice, but UK law has a term that surely applies: perverting the course of justice. For more, see: Dylan Scott: Democrats are kind of freaking out about Trump's Scooter Libby pardon and what it means.

  By the way, I'm not sure that the two are linked, but Libby was Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, and Cheney never had the same sort of influence over the Bush Administration after Libby left. Of course, the other explanation is that Cheney's dominance early on had backfired, especially after the 2006 election debacle. Cheney also lost a key ally when Donald Rumsfeld got sacked, and was further embarrassed as his approval ratings sank under 20%.

• Gary Younge: Trump and Brexit Are Symptoms of the Same Failure to Reckon With Racism: Having lived both in UK and US, Younge seems the failure to deal with racism as leading not just to dysfunction but to dementia, with Brexit and Trump just two flagrant examples.

  The argument about which country is, at present, the most dysfunctional is of course futile, since the answer would render neither any less dysfunctional. Britain set itself an unnecessary question, only then to deliver the wrong answer. Those who led us out of the European Union had no more plans for what leaving would mean than a dog chasing a car has to drive it. Not only do we not know what we want; we have no idea how to get it, even if we did.

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Sunday, April 8, 2018

Meant to write an intro, but ran out of time. So let's cut to the chase.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The week's main political stories, explained: The trade war with China heated up: Trump announced tariffs on a wide range of Chinese exports; China responded with tariffs on US exports; the stock market panicked, then bounced back. Scott Pruitt is suddenly in ethics trouble. Teachers are on strike in Oklahoma and Kentucky. Democrats scored a big win in Wisconsin. More Yglesias pieces:

  • The Wisconsin Supreme Court election shows the blueprint for a Democratic wave.

  • Trump's top infrastructure adviser quit.

  • Trump on trade war with China: "When you're already $500 Billion DOWN, you can't lose!" "And while so far nothing Trump has actually done on trade is all that significant in the grand scheme of things, perpetually making policy on the basis of a total misunderstanding of the issue is potentially quite dangerous."

  • Donald Trump's Twitter feud with Amazon, explained: "A frightening plunge into authoritarianism, or maybe more meaningless nonsense."

  • Conservatives a have no solution for the increasingly bleak economics of raising kids: isn't that just a subset of the general problem that conservatives have no solutions for anything?

  • It's harder for Democrats to gerrymander effectively.

• Tom Hundley: India and Pakistan are quietly making nuclear war more likely: "Both countries are arming their submarines with nukes."

• Umair Irfan: 5 lies Scott Pruitt told this week about his mounting scandals. Irfan also wrote Scott Pruitt's bizarre condo scandal and mounting ethics questions, explained. For Pruitt's background, see David Roberts: Tribalism put Scott Pruitt in power. It may not be enough to save him. Roberts means several different things by "tribalism," ranging from the belief that following conservative ideology is doing God's work to simple service to America's "resource industries":

  Tribalism explains why Pruitt hired an enormous security team, built a $43,000 security phone booth, avoids flying coach, hires political cronies without Senate confirmation, exiles anyone who questions him, boxes out career staff, works to diminish the influence of scientists, meets almost exclusively with industry groups, and has issued agency talking points playing down the threat of climate change.

  However deluded Pruitt may be, a perhaps simpler explanation would be he's simply corrupt. Also: Rebecca Leber: Making America Toxic Again; Margaret Talbot: Scott Pruitt's Dirty Politics. It shouldn't be a surprise when Trump's underlings get caught up in scandals: their whole belief system celebrates naked and brutal greed, so while they toil to make the rich richer, they can't help but feel entitled to their share of the spoils. I suppose what's unique about Pruitt is the siege mentality he brought to the job -- hence the millions he's spent on isolating himself from the public and his own department. He clearly knows that his agenda to reverse fifty years of clean air and water regulations is vastly unpopular. He's clearly bracing for revolt. One example is Matt Shuham: Collins: Pruitt Is 'Wrong Person' to Lead EPA 'On Policy Grounds Alone': Of course, I've been saying that all along, but it's good to see anyone (especially a Republican senator) able to see the fire through the smoke.

  At the same time Pruitt is likely to be fired for his scandals, there's a curious effort -- possibly promoted by Pruitt himself -- to promote him to Attorney General. See Andrew Prokop: The Scott Pruitt for attorney general rumor Trump just angrily tweeted about, explained.

• Dahlia Lithwick: Secret Handshake: "The depressing truth at the center of the O'Reilly and Trump settlement agreements."

• Suresh Naidu/Eric Posner/Glen Weyl: More and more companies have monopoly power over workers' wages. That's killing the economy.

• Anna North: What would America look like without Roe v. Wade? These teenagers are finding out: Article doesn't really live up to its title, but the story it tells is tragic and shows how stupid some government bureaucrats can be when they let rigid political beliefs dictate policy. You'd think that even ardent Trump nativists would see some merit to allowing teenage refugee girls to get an abortion rather than give birth to new citizens. One of the more chilling stories I've read about the Trump administration. North also wrote: How Trump helped inspire a wave of strict new abortion laws, and Plenty of conservatives really do believe women should be executed for having abortions.

• Mark Perry: Steve Coll's Directorate S is Disturbing Account of U.S. Mistakes After 9/11: I'm about 200 pages into Coll's book, which thus far isn't nearly as disturbing as it should be. I've noted several key points so far: the US categorically rejected any sort of negotiations that might have shorted the rush to war; the CIA, which got the jump over DOD by being able to move into Afghanistan quicker, favored cash deals with warlords over state-building with Karzai or anything that might have reduced stress or aided development; the CIA introduced a torture regime which they had no experience with, and which almost immediately backfired; the US made no effort to reduce tensions between Pakistan and India, which ultimately were the main driving force behind Pakistani "duplicity" -- the tendency to salute the US flag while pursuing their own interests; meanwhile, Rumsfeld was preoccupied with invading Iraq, while totally hand-waving the problem of what to do following "catastrophic success." That brings us to about 2004, before American involvement in Afghanistan really fell apart. The book goes much further, and no doubt more problems will become clearer. The one common denominator among every American involved -- even Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad. ambassador 2003-05 before moving on to Iraq -- was their total indifference to how the occupying American warriors were perceived by locals.

  By the way, one tragic side story. When Hillary Clinton and Jack Reed, US Senators, came to Afghanistan to support the war (and talk about all the great things Americans were doing for Afghan women), they were met by a VIP support convoy, which on their way had hit and killed an Afghan woman pedestrian (and didn't stop, per security protocol).

• Emily Stewart: Trump threatens a "big price" after reports of deadly chemical attack in Syria: Just a week or two ago, Trump was talking about withdrawing American troops from Syria following the dissolution of ISIS as its capital in Raqqa was captured. But ever since Obama declared that use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a "red line" warranting US armed response anti-Assad forces have promoted reports of chemical weapons use to goad the US into further involvement. Obama backed down after Assad agreed to destroy all of his chemical weapons, which should have been the end of the issue. However, in April 2017 Trump bit on another report and ordered punitive cruise missile strikes. I've never been convinced that Assad directed the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, but hawks were conveniently able to keep the US pinned down in the Syrian Civil War for another year afterward, and that history is clearly being repeated here. Lindsey Graham, in particular, is going out of his way to goad Trump into further bombing. As for the effect of last year's salvo, see Fred Kaplan: Lost in Syria: "One year after Trump launched missiles at Syria, we still don't know what he's trying to accomplish there."

  By the way, I'm sure you've heard all about the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skirpal in London -- especially how the UK and US have decided to retaliate against Russia's "chemical weapons attack" by chucking dozens of Russian diplomatic personnel out. Less likely that you've seen this: Jason Ditz: Ex-Spy Skirpal Recovering Rapidly, Hospital Confirms. American media is so slanted that it's easy to get the ball rolling on a story that blames the Russians, and nearly impossible to reverse it. I don't doubt that there is much to be critical of Putin and his country for, but often the point of such stories here is to advance a (Neo) Cold War agenda that threatens world peace.

• Alexia Underwood: Sisi won Egypt's election. That doesn't mean he's safe. People complain about Putin rigging the Russian presidential election, but at least he had opposition and Russians had a choice. (Not very good choices, as at least one potential opposition candidate was excluded from the ballot.) But there's nothing fair about Egypt's election, where Sisi got 97% of the vote, defeating "the only other candidate, Mousa Mostafa Mousa, who was publicly known to be a strong supporter of the president."

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Sunday, April 1, 2018

I was prepared to skip this weekly exercise completely: I spent most of the last week preparing for my sister's funeral (or "celebration of life" as the official title went) and related social gatherings. But with the last such event ended this afternoon, and with various guests taking their leave, I found myself wanting to do something "normal." Not that much of what follows can be considered "normal" in any other regard. I recently read Allen Frances' Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump, which fell rather short of its titular ambition. Although there are occasional references to commonplace psychology, he mostly focuses on ubiquity and persistence of "delusional thinking" -- mostly defined as failure to recognize a long list of liberal political creeds. I don't have much quarrel with his platform planks, but I'm more suspicious of economic/class factors than psychological ones. Where I think insight into psychology might be helpful is in trying to model human behavior given the complexity of the world and our various limits in apprehending it. It's certainly credible that psychological traits that were advantageous in primitive societies malfunction in our changing world, but how does that work? And what sort of adjustments would work better?

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The 4 stories that drove this week in politics: David Shulkin is out at Veterans Affairs; Oklahoma teachers are going on strike; Conservative media feuded with Parkland students; Trump gave a weird speech: "one of the rambling, factually challenged addresses for which he's famous. . . . Trump will continue to walk the line between dishonest, uninformed, and inarticulate in a way that keeps people guessing." Other Yglesias pieces:

  • Trump-era politics is a surreal nightmare and we can't wake up: "Diving back in kind of reminds me of Charlton Heston waking from his space travel to discover that he's on a planet run by orangutans. Except instead of orangutans, we have the Republican Party."

  • Ousted VA secretary blasts privatization in a New York Times op-ed: The effect, I think, is to frame his firing as a policy dispute. Sure, there is a major policy divide between an ideological faction that wants to privatize VA health care and those, including virtually all veterans groups, who like the current fully socialized system. The privatisers were able to push Shulkin out not by winning their policy argument, but by characterizing Shulkin as insufficiently loyal to Trump.

  • David Shulkin is out as secretary of veterans affairs.

  • Let's not repeal the 2nd Amendment: Former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens wrote an op-ed: Repeal the Second Amendment -- not a new idea as Stevens previously included changes to the second amendment in his 2014 book Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution. Yglesias argues that even under the precedent-setting Heller ruling, which Stevens dissented from and cites as reason for amending the constitution, there is still a lot of leeway for sensible regulation of guns -- indeed, much more than there is political will to implement. Moreover, just as Heller reversed over a hundred years of precedents, Yglesias proposes that new Supreme Court justices could reverse Heller. As a practical matter, he's probably right.

  • John Williams will likely be the next president of the New York Fed: "He's got a track record of poor forecasting and weak regulation."

  • Stormy Daniels' 60 Minutes interview raises 2 critical questions she can't answer:

    1. How many other sexual partners has Trump paid hush money to?
    2. How many foreign intelligence services know about one or more of these women?

• Dylan Curran: Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you.

• Barbara Ehrenreich: It Is Expensive to Be Poor.

  If anything, the criminalization of poverty has accelerated since the recession, with growing numbers of states drug testing applicants for temporary assistance, imposing steep fines for school truancy, and imprisoning people for debt. Such measures constitute a cruel inversion of the Johnson-era principle that it is the responsibility of government to extend a helping hand to the poor. Sadly, this has become the means by which the wealthiest country in the world manages to remain complacent in the face of alarmingly high levels of poverty: by continuing to blame poverty not on the economy or inadequate social supports, but on the poor themselves.

• Joy Crane/Nick Tabor: 501 Days in Swampland: "A constant drip of self-dealing. And this is just what we know so far . . ."

• Thomas Frank: Dow dreamers show Trump's war on elites is pure fantasy: On Larry Kudlow and Kevin Hassett.

• Ann Hulbert: Today's Rebels Are Model Children: "The young protesters now on the march are responsible and mature -- and they're asking adults to grow up."

• Stephen Kinzer: Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemalan Dictator Convicted of Genocide, Dies at 91.

• Jen Kirby: Here are 6 of the most bizarre things Trump said in his infrastructure speech.

• Paul Krugman: Putting the Ex-Con in Conservatism.

• Anna North: How Trump helped inspire a wave of strict new abortion laws.

• Richard Silverstein: IDF Murders 17 Gazans, Wounds 1,400 in Great Return March Protest; also Robert Mackey: Israel Opens Fire on Palestinian Protesters in Gaza; Trump Envoy Blames "Hostile March"; also James North: 'NY Times' covers up Israel's killing of nonviolent protesters along the Gaza border; and Philip Weiss: A brief, unhappy history of Israeli massacres.

• Matt Taibbi: Is the Two-Party System Doomed?: Reflecting on a comparative politics essay (US, France, UK) by Thomas Piketty called Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right. I don't quite get it, but:

  But having two parties sponsored by the same donors simply can't work in the long-term. The situation ends up being what a Colombian politician once deemed "two horses with the same owner."

  From Mitt Romney's idiotic tirade against "the 47%" to Hillary Clinton's recent remarks about how she won all the "dynamic" parts of America, our political leaders have consistently showed that they don't see or understand the levels of resentment out there.

  Papers like Piketty's are a warning that if the intellectuals in both parties don't come up with a real plan for dealing with the income disparity problem before someone smarter than Donald Trump takes it on, they're screwed. Forget nativists vs. globalists. Think poor vs. rich. Think 99 to 1. While Washington waits with bated breath for the results of the Mueller probe, it's the other mystery -- how do we fix this seemingly unfixable economic system -- that is keeping the rest of the country awake at night.

  Taibbi notes that Trump at least took advantage of the resentments of the excluded, even if all he had to offer were lies. It's likely to be hard to pull that off again given his track record, but worth recalling that the only thing that made him seem credible in 2016 was how completely the Clintons had been discredited.

• Danny Vinik: How Trump favored Texas over Puerto Rico.

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Sunday, March 25, 2018

With Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster recently purged, Mike Pompeo promoted to Secretary of State, torture diva Gina Haspel taking over the CIA, and veteran blowhard John Bolton given the laughable title of National Security Adviser, the closest the administration can come to a moderating voice of sanity in foreign affairs is the guy nicknamed "Mad Dog." Trump continues to replace his first team of "yes men" with even more sycophantic wannabes, doubling down on his search for the least critical, least competent hacks in American politics. On the other hand, it's not as if delegating policy to the Republican Party apparatchiki was doing anything to accomplish his vision of "making America great again." Over the last few weeks he's not only made major strides at cleaning house, he's pushed out several of his signature trade initiatives. He seems determined to double down until he blows himself up -- and surely you realize by now the last thing he cares about is how that affects anyone else.

I don't say much about trade below, although I've probably read a dozen pieces complaining either about how ineffective his tariffs will be or how they'll lead to trade wars and other mischief that will make us poorer. The first thing to understand about trade is that business has already adjusted to whatever the status quo is, so anything that changes it is going to upset their apple cart, much faster than it's going to help anyone else out. So all restrictions on trade seem bad to someone prepared to shout out about it. On the other hand, business is eager to promote expansions to trade that offer short-term benefits, especially before anyone who's going to be hurt can get organized. So I take most of what I read with a grain of salt: not just because the dialogue is polluted by interested bodies but because it's kind of a sideshow. The question that matters is not whether there's more trade or less, but what is the power balance between capital and labor (and consumers, sure, but they're often touted by capitalists as the real beneficiaries of lower-priced imports, something capitalists wouldn't bother us with if they didn't stand to be bigger winners). The problem with TPP wasn't that it reduced trade barriers. It was that it reduced the power of people to regulate corporations, and that it sought to increase corporate rents through "intellectual property" claims.

Aside from raising tax revenues, the purpose of tariffs is to protect investment by organizing a captive, non-competitive market. However, in a world where there is already more steelmaking capacity than there is market, American steel companies won't make the investments to increase steel production. Rather, they'll reap excess profits while the tariffs last -- which probably won't be for long. Of course, that's not even what Trump's thinking. He thinks he's penalizing foreign misbehavior (like subsidizing investment then dumping overproduction). Maybe the real problem is that Americans aren't doing the same things? But there's a reason for that: we do all our business through private corporations, which workers and citizens have no stake in, so we don't even have the concept of directing investment where it might yield broad benefits.

On the other hand, note that if China decides to impose tariffs on American goods, they're likely to back those up with strategic investments to build competitive industries, temporarily protected behind those tariffs. For an example of the kind of piece I've been ignoring (but spurred some of my thinking above), see Eduardo Porter/Guilbert Gates: How Trump's Protectionism Could Backfire. Somewhat more amusing is Paul Krugman: Trump and Trade and Zombies. Also see Paul Krugman Explains Trade and Tariffs.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The week's 4 most important political stories, explained: John Bolton will be the national security adviser (replacing H.R. McMaster; quote: "Bolton apparently promised Trump 'he wouldn't start any wars' as a condition for getting the job, so maybe he won't"); Trump switched trade wars (first, the steel tariffs got gutted by carving out exceptions for a bunch of countries which make up a large majority of US steel imports; then Trump announced new tariffs on Chinese goods); We have an omnibus ($1.3 trillion in government spending, including a little for the wall and a lot for the military); Facebook is in hot water over data leaks (above and beyond the mischief they do of their own). Other Yglesias pieces this week:

  • The partisan gender gap among millennials is staggeringly large: "Women born after 1980 favor Democrats 70-23."

  • The case against Facebook: actually, several cases, including that it "makes people depressed and lonely," and that it's poisoning society:

    Rumors, misinformation, and bad reporting can and do exist in any medium. But Facebook created a medium that is optimized for fakeness, not as an algorithmic quirk but due to the core conception of the platform. By turning news consumption and news discovery into a performative social process, Facebook turns itself into a confirmation bias machine -- a machine that can best be fed through deliberate engineering.

    In reputable newsrooms, that's engineering that focuses on graphic selection, headlines, and story angles while maintaining a commitment to accuracy and basic integrity. But relaxing the constraint that the story has to be accurate is a big leg up -- it lets you generate stories that are well-designed to be psychologically pleasing, like telling Trump-friendly white Catholics that the pope endorsed their man, while also guaranteeing that your outlet gets a scoop.

  • Everyone loves nurses and hates Mitch McConnell.

  • The myth of "forcing people out of their cars"

  • Donald Trump's threat to the rule of law is much bigger than Robert Mueller.

• Fred Kaplan: It's Time to Panic Now: "John Bolton's appointment as national security adviser puts us on a path to war." Bolton may or may not be the most consistent, most inflexible of neocon warmongers, but where he has really distinguished himself is in obstructing any option other than war. If he can't bully the other side into submission, he'll launch an attack, convinced of American omnipotence and oblivious to any evidence to the contrary. The job of National Security Adviser is to offer the president a range of options. Bolton sees no range, and Trump must know that. If Trump's been frustrated by being surrounded by advisers who argued against launching a "preventive" war with North Korea, he won't have any problems with Bolton.

  For more background on Bolton, see David Bosco: The World According to Bolton [PDF, originally from 2005]. More Bolton pieces:

  • Summer Concepcion: Bolton Set to 'Clean House' at NSC, Ousting Dozens of WH Officials.

  • Kary Lowe: If John Bolton Is Right, Pearl Harbor Was Perfectly Legal: Based on Bolton's argument that a "preventive war" against North Korea would be "legal." By the way, note that a peculiar thing about "preventive" is that the adjective becomes meaningless the moment you apply it to nouns like "war": "preventive war" == "war," plain and simple. The adjective hides nothing.

  • Gareth Porter: The Untold Story of John Bolton's Campaign for War With Iran.

  • Matt Purple: A Madman on the National Security Council.

  • Walter Shapiro: John Bolton is a hawk itching for war - and few are there to stop him: Actually, a pretty awful piece, scoring reasonable points against Bolton then squandering them by by focusing on "his Neville Chamberlain moustache." Worst is this:

    As for Bolton, he was the wild man in George W Bush's tragically misguided, but sane, administration. Under Trump, though, he may end up as the sanest man in the Land of the Crazy.

    Trump may be crazy but it was Bush's people who lambasted "the reality-based community" -- hardly a sane position. And doesn't "tragically" imply some sort of noble intentions? Bush seized on 9/11 as an excuse for becoming a "war president" mostly because he remembered war boosting his father's approval polls (which sunk like a rock after the Gulf War ended, a mistake GW never came close to repeating. As for Bolton being the sane one now, that's based on what?

  • Philip Weiss: War-loving, Muslim-hating John Bolton wants to give 'pieces' of Palestine to Jordan and Egypt: This, by the way, isn't necessarily a bad idea, at least compared to indefinitely extending the status quo -- evidently the agenda of virtually every party in Israel. Of course, it would depend on the sort of details you can't expect Bolton to support or even imagine: equal rights for all Palestinians left in Israel; local democracy for the Palestinian pieces (given that neither Egypt nor Jordan are remotely democratic); a complete shift of security responsibilities from Israel to Egypt/Jordan; some serious money for reconstruction and redevelopment.

  • Robin Wright: John ("Bomb Iran") Bolton, the New Warmonger in the White House.

• Jen Kirby: The March for Our Lives, explained: "Thousands turned out for rallies in Washington, DC, and hundreds of cities across the United States."

• Nomi Prins: Jared Kushner, You're Fired: "A Political Obituary for the President's Son-in-Law."

• Matt Taibbi: The Legacy of the Iraq War: Fifteen year anniversary piece of Bush's invasion of Iraq. I would put more stress on Bush's earlier invasion of Afghanistan, and indeed the whole premise that the overbloated US military should be trusted, if not to defend us from attacks like 9/11 at least to avenge them. On the other hand, Taibbi goes the extra step in showing how the misuse of the military in the Global War on Terror is rooted in the much older multi-faceted war the US fought against the workers and peasants of the world, the one we sanitize by calling it the Cold War. He also ends memorably on Trump:

  It was for sure a contributing factor in the election of Donald Trump, whose total ignorance and disrespect for both the law and the rights of people deviates not one iota from our official policies as they've evolved in the last fifteen years.

  Trump is just too stupid to use the antiseptic terminology we once thought we had to cook up to cloak our barbarism. He says "torture" instead of "enhanced interrogation" because he can't remember what the difference is supposed to be. Which is understandable. Fifteen years is a long time for a rotting brain to keep up a pretense.

  We flatter ourselves that Trump is an aberration. He isn't. He's a depraved, cowardly, above-the-law bully, just like the country we've allowed ourselves to become in the last fifteen years.

  Posted before Trump's Bolton pick, but the likeness is pretty glaring. Also looking back on America's recent wars: Andrew Bacevich: A Memo to the Publisher of the New York Times. One thing here is that I don't see how you can complain about the Times' contribution to "having tacitly accepted that, for the United States, war has become a permanent condition," without noting a single thing that the Times has published on Israel in the last, oh, sixty years.

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Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Started this on Sunday, but too many distractions kept me from wrapping it up in a timely fashion. As I've noted already, my sister, Kathy Hull, died last week. We've had visitors and all sorts of chores to do, and I've been plagued by my own health problems. One thing that I did notice was that the sense of horror I felt on hearing the news was one I had experienced several times before: when, for instance, my first wife died, and most recently when Donald Trump was elected president. A big part of that sensation is the dread of facing a future not of unknown and unimaginable consequences but of quite certain pain and loss. The news since election day has merely born out that expected dread. Numerous examples follow, and I'm sure I'm missing at least as much more. One thing I suppose I should take comfort from is that when we finally have a memorial for Kathy (on March 31), we will have fond memories and a lot of art to celebrate. When Trump's term ends we're unlikely to recall a single shred of redeeming value.

Of course, the two events are not comparable in any regard except personal emotional impact on me. The key point is that the shock of the 2016 election, the immediate apprehension of what the American people just did to themselves, hit me pretty much as hard, with much the same body chemistry. Of course, the grief tracks have been/will be different. We will adjust to the impoverished world without her, but the blow has been struck, both final and finite. On the other hand, Trump and his Congress and Courts have barely started to take their toll, which will only grow over time and won't stop when his term ends. On the other hand, there are things that can be done to alter or even reverse the course Trump has set us on. And there is at least one thing I can take comfort in: I've spent literally all of my adult life in opposition to whoever has held political power, as indeed I would still be had Hillary Clinton won, but since the 1970s I've never been in such large or dynamic company. It's also nice to feel no need to defend Clinton when she says something tone-deaf (like her note that she won the urban areas that had fared best under her party's neoliberal advancement) or any of the other petty scandals she's prone to.

By the way, this week is the fifteenth anniversary of Bush's invasion of Iraq. I took another look at what I wrote on March 18, and much of what I wrote then holds up; especially:

As I write this, we cannot even remotely predict how this war will play out, how many people will die or have their lives tragically transfigured, how much property will be destroyed, how much damage will be done to the environment, what the long-term effects of this war will be on the economy and civilization, both regionally and throughout the world. In lauching his war, Bush is marching blithely into the unknown, and dragging the world with him.

I probably tried too hard to rationalize the Bush case, and I spent a lot of time fantasizing that Iraqis might wise up and figure out how to play the PR game in ways that might limit the destruction. That didn't happen first because the seemingly easy military victory unleashed an extraordinary degree of American hubris, and partly because it took very little resistance to change the American stance from would-be benefactor to occupier and schemer. My other mistake was in failing to see how much the US failure in Afghanistan, which was already obvious even if less observed, prefigured the very same failure in Iraq. Not that I was unaware of Afghanistan. Indeed, I've always known that the prime mistake Bush made after 9/11 was driving into Afghanistan.

Even though this isn't appearing until Tuesday, I've tried to limit the stories/links to last Sunday. Some later ones may have crept in -- especially on the Cambridge Analytica story.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: The four most important policy stories of the week, explained: Rex Tillerson finally got fired; Democrats won a very red House seat: Conor Lamb in PA-18, a district Trump won by 20 points; Good news at last for banks; The FDA proposed reducing cigarettes nicotine content. Other Yglesias posts:

  • Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's fiery statement about Sessions's decision to fire him.

  • James Mattis is linked to a massive corporate fraud and nobody wants to talk about it.

  • Caught lying about trade with Canada, Trump tweets some new lies about trade with Canada.

  • Larry Kudlow will be Trump's next top economic adviser.

  • Conor Lamb shows that a pro-choice Democrat can win in Trump country.

  • How Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin became the Trump Cabinet's most endangered member.

  • Republicans are reaping the whirlwind: Quick take on Conor Lamb's PA-18 win.

    Despite the internal tension and the 2-point popular vote loss, Trump emerged victorious in 2016; the way was clear for a potential juggernaut moving forward. If the GOP could adopt Trump's ideological synthesis while backing away from his most disreputable personal qualities, they'd be positioned to do extremely well.

    But instead, they've done the opposite. Trump behaves as flagrantly inappropriately as ever, but now the entire party is complicit in it. In exchange, they've gotten Trump to largely drop his eclectic policy approach in favor of a less popular hard-right agenda. And now they're prepared to lose everywhere.

    He's remembering Trump's "ideological synthesis" as something more coherent than it ever was -- that Trump lost it so quickly just goes to show how little grasp he had on it in the first place. Yglesias goes on to say "America needs the GOP to pull out of the tailspin." Actually, America needs the GOP to crash and burn so badly that most current right-wing tenants are forgotten for a generation or more. You'd think the person who wrote the following would recognize that:

    On a policy level, the Trump-era GOP is pushing unpopular policies on all fronts, from the looming deportation of DREAMers to health care executive actions that are driving up premiums to a rollback net neutrality to the dismantling of consumer financial protection rules. These are enormously harmful to the short-term interests of millions of people and to the long-term interests of nearly the entire country.

    At the same time, Trump continues to act like a maniac -- just this week, he fired the secretary of state over Twitter, deployed inappropriate political rhetoric at an official speech to active-duty Marines, and denied Russian culpability for assassinations carried out on British soil -- and it's only Wednesday.

    At the same time, he's enmeshed in an unprecedented level of personal corruption; his business enterprises are set up as perfect vehicles for interest groups seeking favors from the government to line his pockets with cash. And the growing Stormy Daniels scandal suggests a whole new dimension of possible corruption and lawbreaking over and above the basic financial conflicts of interest and the shenanigans with the Russians.

  • Betsy DeVos tweeted a bizarre self-own about Michigan's public schools.

  • Maybe voters aren't as uninformed as elites like to think.

  • It's time to start taking the Stormy Daniels scandal seriously.

  • Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong.

• Tara Isabella Burton: Mike Pompeo, Trump's pick for secretary of state, talks about politics as a battle of good and evil. I don't doubt that Pompeo holds such views, but his predecessor in the House (Todd Tiahrt) was so much worse Pompeo at first seemed like a breath of fresh air. That went stale with Benghazi!, which is undoubtedly what put him on Trump's radar, and he's gone over the top playing up his stance as a neocon hawk. The Senate should find his nomination alarming, but so far more people have expressed more worry about Gina Haspel, his (well, Trump's) pick to replace him as CIA director -- see, e.g., Matt Taibbi: Trump's CIA Pick Took Part in Silencing Torture Suspect. By the way, Taibbi also wrote It's Too Late to Worry About 'Normalizing' Trump. Decades of Policy Did That for Him: "The current president is just too stupid to be embarrassed about things his predecessors all did, too."

• Ted Golshan/Jen Kirby: Florida pedestrian bridge collapses, leaving at least 6 dead: what we know.

• Jeff Hauser: How Jeff Sessions Is Sneaking Trump Allies Into Key DOJ Positions That Normally Require Senate Confirmation.

• Doug Henwood: Here's Why Labor Should Resist Trump's Tariff: Some interesting numbers here:

  While steel employment is off 54 percent since 1990, the production of steel (by the Federal Reserve's measure) is up 18 percent. Between 1990 and 2015 (the latest year available), productivity per hour of labor in the steel sector was up 151 percent. Labor's share of value-added in the industry -- the portion of the difference between revenues and costs of raw materials that's paid out to workers -- fell from 23 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2015. . . .

  We have some recent experience with steel tariffs, the ones imposed by George W. Bush in March 2002. Bush lifted them in December 2003, under threat of retaliation by the EU, with another politically well-selected set of targets (Florida oranges, and Harleys again), and complaints by domestic steel users. During the 21 months they were in effect, steel employment fell by 9 percent, but production rose by 20 percent.

  Bottom line seems to be that tariffs will help producer profits but not jobs.

• Sean Illing: Team of sycophants: a presidential historian on Trump's White House: Interview with Robert Dallek. Starts by contrasting Franklin Roosevelt, who encouraged frank arguments among his staff, but doesn't point out the more critical difference: that FDR allowed airing all the views because he wanted to centralize decision making for himself, whereas Trump doesn't just delegate, he encourages his minions to make policy without him (at least on matters he doesn't understand or care about, which is to say that aren't directly tied up in his brand identity). Dallek goes on to slander Warren Harding ("you have to go all the way back to Warren G. Harding in 1921 to find a president as unqualified to hold office as Trump is"). The most obvious likeness isn't their lack of qualifications but the extraordinary level of corruption under both presidencies, but a big difference was that Harding was at worst indifferent, Trump is the foremost practitioner. Note that Paul Krugman came up with a similar theme in Springtime for Sycophants.

• Lauren Katz: Ryan Zinke spent his first year in office selling off rights to our public lands.

• John Lanchester: You Are the Product: Review, dated 17 August 2017, of three books about social media -- Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants, Antonio Garcia Martinez's Chaos Monkeys, and Jonathan Taplin's Move Fast and Break Things -- although he's mostly concerned with Facebook. Useful background when you consider, for instance, Sean Illing: Cambridge Analytica, the shady data firm that might be a key Trump-Russia link, explained; Eric Killelea: Cambridge Analytica: What We Know About the Facebook Data Scandal; Matthew Rosenberg: Cambridge Analytica, Trump-Tied Political Firm, Offered to Entrap Politicians; Nico Hines: Cambridge Analytica Offered to Blackmail Politicians With Prostitutes; Sam Biddle: Facebook Quietly Hid Webpages Bragging of Ability to Influence Elections.

• Dara Lind: The death penalty for drug dealers is a terrible idea. It's also part of the White House's new opioid strategy.

• Ganesh Sitaraman: The three crises of liberal democracy: Read this because I just finished the author's very fine book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution. Here he recommends another book, Yascha Mounk's The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It, but I'm less than convinced. Mounk evidently argues that there are three essential groundings to liberal democracy: shared mass media controlled by responsible gatekeepers; relative economic equality; and national homogeneity (shared culture and identity). Mounk is right that all three are stressed recently, however I'd say that the three points have vastly different weights, and I'm not even sure that the first (de-centralized media) and third (greater diversity) are real problems. Inequality is not only vastly more important, it perverts the others.

• Jeff Spross: How vulture capitalists ate Toys 'R' Us: Seems like behind every business failure there's a private equity company with a long history of sucking cash out and piling on debt. In this case, well, KKR and Bain Capital.

• Emily Stewart: "We've been in a trade war for 30 years": a former Trump trade adviser explains the case for tariffs: Interview with Dan DiMicco, former chair and CEO of steel manufacturer Nucor.

• Alex Ward, et al: Andrew McCabe, former FBI deputy director targeted by Trump, was just fired: This story is most often presented as "now he might not get his pension" -- he had already resigned, pushing the effective date out to qualify for a pension, so his firing showed an uncommon degree of vindictiveness. But it raises other questions, like Emily Stewart: Jeff Sessions may have violated his recusal pledge when he fired Andrew McCabe.

• Robert Wright: How the New York Times Is Making War With Iran More Likely. Of course, one could also write a piece on how making Mike Pompeo Secretary of State makes war with Iran more likely -- indeed, war all over the place.

• Jason Zengerle: Eating Away at Government From the Inside: Review of David Cay Johnston's new book, It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America. And it's even worse now than it was when Johnston handed his manuscript in -- for instance, the book doesn't cover Trump's corporate tax cut. Still, one especially apt insight: "The Trump administration deposited political termites throughout the structure of our government. The endgame is not just a smaller government, which Republicans always say they want, but a weak government." This matters because weaker government makes corporations stronger and less accountable to the public -- indeed, to any moral constraint other than their bottom line.

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Sunday, March 11, 2018

Didn't mean to write much this weekend. Just figured I'd go through the motions, starting with the usual Yglesias links, to have something for future reference, and to check how the update mechanism works on the transplanted website. Guess I got a little carried away.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias: 4 stories that really mattered this week: Trump slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum; Gary Cohn says he's quitting: the top White House economic adviser, formerly of Goldman Sachs; Trump will (maybe) do a summit with Kim Jong Un; Red-state teachers are getting angry: in West Virginia, most obviously, with Oklahoma and Arizona in the wings. Other Yglesias pieces:

  • Globalists, explained: Evidently, some people view "globalist" as an anti-semitic term. Today's example: Trump describing the departing Gary Cohn as a "globalist." An older term is "cosmopolitan," although I've found the German more interesting: "weltbürgerlich" -- citizen of the world. Such allusions seem to be endemic with the alt-right, even more so with Trump, but I'm not sure that it's useful at all to dwell on them. Nearly everything that Trump and his ilk say that can be read as anti-semitic is also wrong for other reasons, and people miss that when they get hung up on anti-semitic stereotypes. One word that doesn't appear here is "neoliberal," which is actually a better description of Cohn -- including Cohn's differences from the Trumpian nationalists -- but doesn't seem to be part of their vocabulary.

  • The real danger to the US economy in Trump's trade policy: "It's not the tariffs; it's what happens next.".

  • The DCCC should chill out and do less to try to pick Democrats' nominees: "There's very little evidence that "electable" moderates do better."

  • Trump's trade demand to China is pathetically small: "The US-China trade deficit rose $28 billion last year. Trump is asking for a $1 billion cut." Actually, that understates the plan, as The actual trade deficit is $375.2 billion -- "a drop in the bucket." Moreover, the plan is just an ask: "Trump is asking the Chinese to find a way to cut it by less than 0.27 percent but acting like he's a tough guy."

  • Cory Booker's new Workers Dividend Act, explained: "A Bloomberg analysis shows that of America's $54 billion corporate tax windfall, so far $21.1 billion has been kicked to shareholders in the form of 'buybacks,' almost twice as much as has gone to employees in higher compensation and far more than has been spent on capital investments or research and development." Booker's bill seeks to rebalance that by giving people who work for companies that do stock buybacks a piece of the profit. That's nice for them, but doesn't help anyone else. It is, at best, a tiny step toward equality, piggybacked on a larger step in the opposite direction.

  • The 17 Democrats selling out on bank regulation is worse than it looks. I don't see a list or a vote total, so I'm not sure just who he's blaming, but the bill in question is the Republicans' gift to the industry that sunk the economy in 2008, a more/less significant rollback of the relatively feeble reform package known as Dodd-Frank. For more on the bill, see: Emily Stewart: The bank deregulation bill in the Senate, explained; also Ross Barkan: The rich and the right want to dynamite Dodd-Frank -- and Democrats are helping them do it:

    It's worth considering when bipartisanship can still exist in this deeply polarizing moment. It cannot live where there is a growing national consensus, as over the severity of climate change or the scourge of mass shootings.

    It cannot live in any kind of economic matter that benefits the working class or the poor, even after Donald Trump managed to shred rightwing economic orthodoxies on his way to the presidency -- never mind that he's governing like a Koch brothers pawn.

    Democrats and Republicans can only come together to feather the nests of the rich and powerful. Weakening Dodd-Frank confirms the worst suspicions of any cynical voter -- that the political class really is colluding to screw them over.

  • Trump's tariffs are a scary look at what happens when he actually tries to govern: Good point, but I certainly wouldn't go this far:

    The Trump era has, so far, gone better than anyone had any right to expect. It's true that as problems arise -- flu, drug overdoses, Hurricane Maria, school shootings -- Trump invariably fails to rise to the occasion. And, from time to time, he for no good reason opts to pour salt in America's racial wounds. His immigration policies are making us poorer and meaner, while his health care and tax policies make our economy more unequal.

    But on a day-to-day basis, life goes on.

    Despite the frightening concentration of incompetence in the West Wing, many critical posts -- most of all at the Departments of Defense and Treasury and the Federal Reserve -- appear to be in the hands of basically capable people. Trump's habit of relentlessly deferring to GOP congressional leadership on policy issues is disappointing if you were a true believer in Trumpism, but sort of vaguely reassuring if you found the idea of installing a narcissistic rage-holic in the Oval Office alarming.

    I'd submit that there's a lot more on the negative side of the ledger, and little if anything on the positive. I'll also stipulate that most folks won't understand the negative side until it comes crashing down on them like a ton of bricks, but the number of people who this has happened to already is non-trivial (especially immigrants of various degrees, and most people in Puerto Rico). Policies by their very nature have slow triggers, but that doesn't mean that today's decisions won't catch up with us sooner or later. And while it's true that some of Trump's administrators don't seem to be competent enough to destroy departments they loathe -- Rich Perry, Ben Carson, Betsy De Vos -- others are more than capable -- Ryan Zinke at Interior, Scott Pruitt at EPA, Budget Director Mick Mulvaney. That Mattis and Mnuchin lack the same streak of nihilism has more to do with the usefulness of their departments to rich donors than relative sanity.

• James K Galbraith: Trump's steel tariffs are mere political theater: Points out something I haven't seen noted elsewhere: similar tariffs have been implemented twice before, first under Reagan and again by GW Bush. Neither had any real effect, least of all on rebuilding the American steel industry. Nor did they generate much controversy, as they were mere "political theater" by politicians who were otherwise reliable neoliberals. If Trump's generating more controversy, that's probably because he's ideologically less trustworthy -- not that he actually understands or believes in anything.

• Jeff Goodell: Welcome to the Age of Climate Migration: "Extreme weather due to climate change displaced more than a million people from their homes last year. It could soon reshape the nation." Key takeaway here: it's already happening, and it's measurable.

• Jane Mayer: Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier. Long piece, dovetails with and expands upon what I know about the various Russia scandals.

• Heather Digby Parton: Running for the White House Exits: Who Would Want to Work for President Trump Anyway?

• Matt Shuman: At Political Rally, Trump Repeats Call to Give Drug Dealers the Death Penalty: Disturbing on many levels, partly because his ego seems to require the periodic stoking, partly because he clearly figures that what would appeal most to his base is public blood-letting. Curious, too, that he actually cites China as his authority on how effective the death penalty is at stopping drug traffic. (Of course, he could just as well have cited the Philippines' Duterte, who like trump believes "act first, due process later.")

• Matt Taibbi: Trump Is a Dangerous Idiot. So Why Are We Pushing Him Toward War? Provides many examples of people with serious foreign policy credentials (i.e., a track record of having been wrong many times in the past) doing just that: two that especially stick in my crawl are David Ignatius and Kenneth Pollack ("of the American Enterprise Institute").

  Meanwhile, in the States, the only thing about Donald Trump that any sane person ever had to be grateful for was that he entered the White House claiming to be isolationist and war-averse. That soon proved to be a lie like almost everything else about his campaign, but Jesus, do we have to help this clown down the road toward General Trump fantasies?

  We have the dumbest, least competent White House in history. Whatever else anyone in America has as a goal for Trump's remaining time in office, the single most important priority must to be keeping this guy away from the nuclear button. Almost anything else would be survivable.

  Which is why it makes no sense to be taunting Trump and basically calling him a wuss for negotiating with Kim Jong Un or being insufficiently aggressive in Syria.

  To get a glimpse of what passes for thinking in Pollack's brain, take a look at his Learning From Israel's Political Assassination Program, a review of Ronen Bergman's huge (753 pp.) book, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations. Israel has undertaken such "targeted killings" throughout its history, but the rate (and indifference to "collateral damage") increased dramatically after 2001. The US has followed suit:

  There have been many who have objected, claiming that the killings inspire more attacks on the United States, complicate our diplomacy and undermine our moral authority in the world. Yet the targeted killings drone on with no end in sight. Just counting the campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the Bush administration conducted at least 47 targeted killings by drones, while under the Obama administration that number rose to 542.

  America's difficult relationship with targeted killing and the dilemmas we may face in the future are beautifully illuminated by the longer story of Israel's experiences with assassination in its own endless war against terrorism. Israel has always been just a bit farther down this slippery slope than the United States. If we're willing, we can learn where the bumps are along the way by watching the Israelis careening ahead of us.

  Pollack admits that "targeted killings" are a mere tactic in the larger effort to suppress terrorism, and that there's no reason to think they're particularly effective. He goes on to blather a lot about COIN theory, without recognizing that Israel has never been in the least interested in "winning hearts and minds." Israel's sole goal, at least since Independence and arguably a good deal earlier, has been to establish an ethnocracy and maintain it by overwhelming force. They understand that they cannot convince Palestinians to agree to a debased and subservient status, but they persist in believing that they can maintain their two-tier society by imposing domination and terror.

  Pollack does fault Israel for being unwilling to accept the "land-for-peace" option to actually resolve the conflict, but he fails to understand why. For "land-for-peace" to work, two things have to happen: the reason Israel might be willing to give up land is to rid itself of Palestinians, thus ensuring a stronger Jewish majority; having secured demographic dominance, Israel could then afford to offer its remaining Palestinians equal rights, ending the conflict. It is this latter point, equality, that Israelis cannot abide. They would rather endure perpetual conflict than to give up their superiority.

  I doubt Bergman's book reveals much "secret history." Israel has been bragging about their assassination program for many years, and now that the US is wrapped up in its own murderous program, they must feel little public relations risk. On the other hand, the US does at least go through the motions of presenting itself as "a beacon of freedom and justice" -- a stance which is instantly discredited by its murder program (not that many people outside America still believed it). For a better review of Rise and Kill First, see: "Rise and Kill First" Explores the Corrupting Effects of Israel's Assassination Program.

  Taibbi also wrote The New Blacklist: "Russiagate may have been aimed at Trump to start, but it's become a way of targeting all dissent." He notes the existence of an outfit named Hamilton 68, which tracks everything that seems to be approved by Russia's propagandists (especially through their bots), on the theory that whatever Russia promotes should be opposed. "In fact, unless you're a Hillary Clinton Democrat, you've probably been portrayed as having somehow been in on it, at one time or another."

• Peter Van Buren: What critics of North Korea summit get wrong: Well, first he disposes of the idea that simply meeting confers legitimacy on North Korea. He also makes a plausible case for starting the diplomatic process with a photo-op of the leaders in general agreement. He doesn't delve into the fact that the shakier of the leaders is Trump, both due to his massive ignorance and his relatively weak grasp on America's military and security establishments -- the clearest evidence there is how cheerfully he concedes policy direction to the generals (e.g., in Afghanistan).

• Alex Ward: The past 24 hours in Trump scandals, explained: Seems less like a headline than a feature column that could be rewritten each day. This particular one came out on Thursday, March 8, and covers Trump being sued by porn star Stormy Daniels, and Erik Prince lying about meeting Russians in the Seychelles to discuss setting up a back channel between Trump and Putin, and Trump attempting to influence people Mueller has interviewed in the Russia probe. Tomorrow, and next week, and next month, you'll get a slightly different list of scandals, but as long as the media limits them to things Trump actually knows and does, they'll most likely stay at this trivial level. The real scandals go much deeper, but unless Trump tweets about them, how will White House reporters know?

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