Weekend Roundup [180 - 189]

Sunday, April 16, 2017

Weekend Roundup

After a long post on Saturday, I need to keep this one short, almost schematic.

Saddened to hear of the death of Amy Durfee, 88, a neighbor of my wife's when she was growing up in Oak Park, Michigan. Amy and Art Durfee remained close friends of the family, people we saw every trip we made to Detroit. I feel fortunate to have known them.

The big story this past week has been the Trump Administration's attempt to show North Korea that when they get into a pissing contest the US will not only stand up the challenges but will take the extra step in showing itself to be more insanely belligerent. As best I recall, even Nixon regarded his infamous "madman" ploy as something of a joke -- a nuance Trump clearly is incapable of fathoming. So far, it's been hard to argue that any of Trump's belligerence has transgressed lines that Hillary Clinton was comfortable with, but in Korea he could easily step out too far. This is probably something to write a long post about. Indeed, I've written about Korea several times, including a passage at the start of my memoir, given that I was born the same week China entered the Korean War and turned an American rout into a bloody stalemate. That was the beginning of the end of America both as a global empire and as a nation that could lay some claim to decent and honorable values. Korea was where Americans learned to become the sore losers who invest so much effort in bullying the world and are so unforgiving of any offense. And here we are, sixty-six years later, still picking at the scab of our past embarrassment.

Some scattered links this week in the Trumpiverse:

  • Robert Bateman: Why So Many Americans Support Deadly Aerial Warfare: "It took decades of propaganda to get here." Last week's use of the 21,000 pound "Mother of All Bombs" signifies more as a propaganda coup than for the 90 "ISIS fighters" it killed. The notion of "Victory Through Airpower" goes way back, but what it mostly means today is that we can punish our "enemies" at virtually no risk to ourselves. Removing that risk helps strip away our inhibitions against bombardment, as does the distance. Of course, it matters that one only attacks "enemies" that don't have the capability to respond in kind. ISIS and the Taliban have no airpower to speak of, and lately the US has been able to bomb Iraq and Syria at will with no obvious repercussions (other than the stream of bad press due to civilian casualties, but that rarely registers in "the homeland"). One danger of listening to your own propaganda is a false sense of confidence, which can lead to reckless provocations, like Trump's macho bluff against North Korea.

  • Medea Benjamin: The "Mother of All Bombs" Is Big, Deadly -- and Won't Lead to Peace: Actually, this feels like a publicity stunt, a way to follow up on the gushing press Trump's cruise missile attack on Syria generated. Benjamin doubts that MOAB is "a game changer," then asks: "Will Trump drag us deeper into this endless war by granting the US Afghan commander, Gen. John Nicholson, his request for several thousand more troops?" What worries me more isn't that the US will throw good troops after bad, but that Trump will conclude that what he really needed was a bigger bang -- that MOAB is just a precursor to deploying tactical nuclear weapons.

  • Frank Bruni: Steve Bannon Was Doomed: Bannon always seemed shaky because he clearly had his own ideas and agenda, where Trump had little of either.

    He didn't grapple with who Trump really is. Trump's allegiances are fickle. His attention flits. His compass is popularity, not any fixed philosophy, certainly not the divisive brand of populism and nationalism that Bannon was trying to enforce. Bannon insisted on an ideology when Trump cares more about applause, and what generates it at a campaign rally isn't what sustains it when you're actually governing. . . .

    Bannon is still on the job, and Trump may keep him there, because while he has been disruptive inside the White House, he could be pure nitroglycerin outside. He commands acolytes on the alt-right. He has the mouthpiece of Breitbart News. He has means for revenge. He also has a history of it.

    As for how Bannon could hurt Trump, Bruni cites Sean Illing: If Trump fires Steve Bannon, he might regret it. One need only note that the audience that Bannon cultivated is used to getting screwed over by false heroes, and it will be easy to paint Trump that way. Illing also has an interview with Jane Mayer On the billionaire behind Bannon and Trump

  • Lee Fang: Paul Ryan Raised $657,000 While Avoiding His Constituents During Recess: I guess the buck doesn't stop with Trump.

  • Elizabeth Grossman: "It couldn't get much worse": Trump's policies are already making workplaces more toxic

  • Fred Kaplan: Return of the Madman Theory: Found this after I wrote the "madman" line in the intro, if you want deeper speculation on the subject. Kaplan's argument that Trump's "erratic and unpredictable" foreign policy "might just make the world more stable -- for a short time" is a reach -- it could just as easily backfire spectacularly. For instance, Trump doesn't understand that America's "leadership of the Free World" was something paid for generously, not something simply accorded because the US had the most bombs and the longest reach. So when he tries to shake down NATO members or to flip trade deficits with East Asia he doesn't realize how easy it would be for supposed allies to go their own way.

  • Paul Krugman: Can Trump Take Health Care Hostage?

  • Jon Marshall: Thinking About Spicer's Chemical Weapons Gaffe: I thought about writing more about the use of chemical weapons as the Syria incident/response unfolded, and both Spicer's spouting and Marshall's "thinking" suggests people are short on some of the basics. Marshall writes, "It's no accident that since World War I, the rare uses of chemical weapons have been as terror weapons, as Saddam Hussein did with the Kurds in the 1980s and Assad has during the Syrian Civil War." Actually, more typical examples were by the British in Iraq in the early 1920s and by Italy in Ethiopia in 1937: poison gas is a favored weapon against people with no protection and no ability to respond in kind. I think the only time since the Great War where it was used against a comparable army was by Iraq against Iran, where Iran ruled out reprisals on moral grounds. Saddam Hussein against the Kurds was an isolated incident tied to the Iran War. It's also not clear to me that Assad ever used it in Syria, regardless of what Marshall thinks. No doubt poison gas is terrifying, but so is every other method of killing in war. The international treaties and the general taboo about chemical weapons are just one part of a more general effort to prohibit war, and it's the general case we should focus on.

    For more on Spicer's "doofusery" (Marshall's apt term), see: Amy Davidson: Sean Spicer Is Very Sorry About His Holocaust Comments; also: Brant Rosen: All Pharaohs Must Fall: A Passover Reflection on Sean Spicer.

  • Charles P Pierce: Is Trump Actually in Charge? Or Is It Worse Than We Feared? I don't get the Fletcher Knebel references, but what I take away from the Trump quotes is that he simply lets the military brass do whatever they want, assuming that whatever they come up with will be just great: "We have the greatest military in the world . . . We have given them total authorization, and that's what they're doing. Frankly, that's why they've been so successful lately." This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone: from the start of his campaign, Trump's only original idea was that Obama weakened the country by telling the military "no" too many times. (Personally, I thought Obama said "yes" way too often.) But the problem here isn't uncertainty of control. It's that the military -- indeed, all militaries in recent history -- have tended to be over-optimistic about their own powers, while under-estimating the risks of action, and having no fucking idea about where their aggression might lead.

    Pierce cites Eric Fehrnstrom: The generals come to Trump's rescue, which starts: "Thank God for the gneerals. No one thought they would turn out to be the moderates in the Trump White House. . . . If not for them, Trump's grade on his first 100 days would go from middling to poor." Fehrnstrom is a big fan of "Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly," yet the best he can say for them is that the "first 100 days" have been "middling"?

  • Gareth Porter: New Revelations Belie Trump Claims on Syria Chemical Attack; also Rick Sterling: How Media Bias Fuels Syrian Escalation.

  • Matt Taibbi: For White America, It's 'Happy Days' Again: Or, there ain't gonna be any federal civil rights enforcement while Jeff Sessions is Attorney General. Also the DOJ (formerly Department of Justice) won't be reviewing any alleged instances of local police abuses. Not sure why turning you back on decades of civil rights justice (lackluster as it's been) is supposed to make white people happy -- more like ashamed, I'd say.

  • Annie Waldman: DeVos Pick to Head Civil Rights Office Once Said She Faced Discrimination for Being White.

  • Jon Wiener: On the Road in Trump Country: Interview with Thomas Frank, whose 2016 book Listen, Liberal prefigured the Hillary Clinton debacle.

  • Matthew Yglesias: Trump's pivot is real -- he's more right-wing than ever; or as David Dayen put it, President Bannon Is Dead, Long Live President Cohn.

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still to America's bout of political insanity:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, April 2, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Let's start with a tweet from Dak Zak, in response to someone asking "Why couldn't they have done this before the election!?!":

Newspapers everywhere did this before the election. Editorial after editorial said "stop this man." People didn't hear, listen or care.

As best I can tell (the twitter links are circuitous) the original question refers to the Los Angeles Times' editorial Our Dishonest President (the first of a promised four-part series running through Wednesday, not that I wouldn't be surprised if they find enough new material for a fifth installment by Thursday. Zak's response is pretty much true, but he underestimates the media's failure by an order or magnitude or more. Sure, they warned us to "stop this man," but they were also so thoroughly bemused by him, and enticed by the ratings his campaign offered, that they repeatedly let him slip the hook. But more important, they didn't say "stop this party" -- because ultimately what makes Trump so disastrous is not that he's "a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters" (to quote the LA Times), but that he was swept into power with complete control of Congress ceded to the Republican Party and its agenda to rig politics and the economic and social systems to perpetuate oligarchy. Trump may be especially flagrant (or perhaps just embarrassingly transparent) but the Republican Party has embraced demagoguery and dishonesty as essential political tactics for well over a generation. Trump is more a reflection of the party's propaganda machine than he is a leader. For proof, look how often he gets caught up in obvious contradictions and incoherencies, yet always resolves them by moving in the direction of party orthodoxy.

On the other hand, there is ample evidence that the media is still being bamboozled by the aura of Republican legitimacy, even while individual cases like Trump and Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback turn into public embarrassments. For instance, south-central Kansans will go to the polls a week from Tuesday to elect a replacement for Trump's CIA director Mike Pompeo. The Wichita Eagle, which we often think of as a voice for moderation in Kansas, endorsed Republican Ron Estes, a Brownback flunky lacking a single original thought (they like to describe him as "affable"). The Eagle even singled out Estes' vow to repeal Obamacare as one of their reasons -- even without the usual nostrum "and replace," even with the editorial facing a Richard Crowson cartoon slamming Brownback for vetoing a bill passed by Kansas' Republican legislature to expand Medicaid under the ACA. You'd think a public-interested media would easily see through a partisan hack like Estes, especially given that the Democrats have nominated their strongest candidate in decades ( James Thompson -- saw one of his ads tonight and I can't say I was pumped by the gun bits or even the concern for veterans and jobs, but those things have their constituencies; also thought he should have hit Trump harder, but if he wins that'll be the takeaway).

More fallout from the GOP's health care fiasco:

  • Angela Bonavoglia: The Fight to Save the Affordable Care Act Is Really a Class Battle

  • EJ Dionne: The lessons Trump and Ryan failed to learn from history: Also some lessons they never learned:

    But the bill's collapse was, finally, testimony to the emptiness of conservative ideology. . . . To win the 2012 presidential nomination, Romney could not afford to be seen as the progenitor of Obamacare because conservatism now has to oppose even the affirmative uses of government it once endorsed.

  • Lee Fang: GOP Lawmakers Now Admit Years of Obamacare Repeal Votes Were a Sham

  • Richard Kim: The Tea Party Helped Build the Bridge to Single-Payer: Picture shows a young guy holding a sign that reads "Health care is a human right." That, of course, has nothing to do with the Tea Party, and the argument here is forced:

    Since the first year of Obama's presidency, the Republican establishment has allowed its extreme right-wingers to run off the leash. It has amplified their every outburst, fed every conspiracy theory, nurtured every grievance, and enabled every act of hostage-taking. Now, it -- and the vandal in chief that the Tea Party helped elect president -- is their hostage. In the battles ahead on infrastructure spending, taxation, and the debt ceiling, there's no reason to believe that the GOP will behave in any less dysfunctional a manner.

    A better way to look at it is this: during the Obama years, the Tea Party acted as the "shock troops" of Republican obstruction, and somehow their role there has come to be viewed as a success. So why shouldn't the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus continue to obstruct, even with Republicans controlling Congress and the White House, if they still do things that the insurgents find objectionable? That's what's happening, and mainline Republicans don't have the margins they need to rule without the Caucus, and sometimes realize that catering to them will cause even worse things to happen. Given that the mainliners are pretty awful on their own, we might as well enjoy the Caucus's obstruction, but that doesn't get us to anywhere we need to go.

  • Sam Knight: Bannon-Style "Administrative Deconstruction" of Obamacare Is Coming: Aside from the Bannon-speak, the point here is that the guy in charge of the Obamacare system is its arch-enemy, Tom Price, and there is still a lot of harm bad administration can do, even if it's nominally pledged to support the law. Reminds me that the OEO (Office of Economic Opportunity, one of LBJ's main "War on Poverty" programs) had done quite a bit of good until Nixon appointed Donald Rumsfeld to run it.

  • Mike Konczal: Four Lessons from the Health Care Repeal Collapse: I mentioned this piece in Monday's post, but it's worth mentioning again. I also just noticed Konczal's December 2, 2016 piece: Learning From Trump in Retrospect. Probably could only be written between the election and the inauguration, a period when one could balance off the sensations of surprise and disgust. Two months into his reign and we're back to wondering how anyone could have been taken in by this shallow fraud.

  • Charles Krauthammer: The road to single-payer health care: Rest assured he's against it, and wants to see something far worse than Obamacare even, but he understands the logic that universal coverage, even in its corrupt Obamacare form, makes more efficient solutions like "single payer" ("Medicare for All") more attractive.

  • Paul Krugman: How to Build on Obamacare: Krugman has long been the most persuasive propagandist for the ACA, so no surprise that he sticks within its limits: urging that we spend more money to lower deductibles and make policies more attractive, and revive the "public option" to provide more marketplace competition. His point is that "building on Obamacare wouldn't be hard," but Trump would rather see it "explode," and just for the satisfaction of blaming Democrats -- a tactic which proved viable when Democrats were in power, but looks pretty puerile at the moment.

    Krugman also wrote Coal Country Is a State of Mind, picking on West Virginia, where:

    Why does an industry that is no longer a major employer even in West Virginia retain such a hold on the region's imagination, and lead its residents to vote overwhelmingly against their own interests?

    Coal powered the Industrial Revolution, and once upon a time it did indeed employ a lot of people. But the number of miners began a steep decline after World War II, and especially after 1980, even though coal production continued to rise. This was mainly because modern extraction techniques -- like blowing the tops off mountains -- require far less labor than old-fashioned pick-and-shovel mining. The decline accelerated about a decade ago as the rise of fracking led to competition from cheap natural gas.

    So coal-mining jobs have been disappearing for a long time. Even in West Virginia, the most coal-oriented state, it has been a quarter century since they accounted for as much as 5 percent of total employment.

    What, then, do West Virginians actually do for a living these days? Well, many of them work in health care: Almost one in six workers is employed in the category "health care and social assistance."

    Oh, and where does the money for those health care jobs come from? Actually, a lot of it comes from Washington.

    West Virginia has a relatively old population, so 22 percent of its residents are on Medicare, versus 16.7 percent for the nation as a whole. It's also a state that has benefited hugely from Obamacare, with the percentage of the population lacking health insurance falling from 14 percent in 2013 to 6 percent in 2015; these gains came mainly from a big expansion of Medicaid.

    It's true that the nation as a whole pays for these health care programs with taxes. But an older, poorer state like West Virginia receives much more than it pays in -- and it would have received virtually none of the tax cuts Trumpcare would have lavished on the wealthy.

    Now think about what Trumpism means for a state like this. Killing environmental rules might bring back a few mining jobs, but not many, and mining isn't really central to the economy in any case. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and its allies just tried to replace the Affordable Care Act. If they had succeeded, the effect would have been catastrophic for West Virginia, slashing Medicaid and sending insurance premiums for lower-income, older residents soaring.

    A couple quick points here. First is that we live in a time when business is gaining increasing influence on politics, so while coal companies represent a vanishingly small number of jobs, they dominate the political discourse in states like West Virginia. (If, indeed, jobs mattered you wouldn't find politicians backing company schemes like mountain-top removal, which is profitable primarily because it reduces jobs -- well, as long as the companies don't have to pay the costs of their pollution.) Second, while Democrats are more dependable supporters of effective transfers to poorer states like West Virginia (and Mississippi and much of the South), they almost never campaign on the fact, as they have very little presence in states that have swung against them primarily on race. Rather, Democrats focus on states where they have more upscale supporters, and cater to the businesses of those states (like high-tech in California and Massachusetts, and banking in New York).

  • Bill Moyers: Trump and the GOP in Sickness and Health

  • Charles Ornstein/Derek Willis: On Health Reform, Democrats and Republicans Don't Speak the Same Language

  • Jon Queally: Sen. Bernie Sanders Will Introduce "Medicare for All" Bill; also see Zaid Jilani: Bernie Sanders Wants to Expand Medicare to Everybody -- Exactly What Its Architects Wanted.

  • Kate Zernike et al.: In Health Bill's Defeat, Medicaid Comes of Age

Some scattered links this week in the world of Trump:

  • Stephen Braun/Chad Day: Flynn Earned Millions From Russian Companies: OK, that's the jump headline. The article itself is "Document Dump Reveals Flynn's Russian and Turkish Income Sources." And the "millions" shrink to "$1.3 million for work for political groups and government contractors, as well as for speeches to Russian companies and lobbying for a firm owned by a Turkish businessman." Doesn't seem like much, but then what else can a former general do? You don't expect him to live on his exorbitant pension, do you? Lachlan Markay has more: Michael Flynn Failed to Disclose Payments From Russian Propaganda Network. Also: Zack Beauchamp: Michael Flynn's immunity request, explained:

    More fundamentally, it's hard to see Democrats granting one to a widely disliked former Trump official when there's still a chance the FBI might prosecute him for allegedly lying to the bureau about his contacts with the Russian envoy to the US. The Trump administration's call for Flynn to appear before Congress, in Sean Spicer's Friday press briefing, could very well harden their resolve against immunity.

    This is all very bad news for Flynn, who ironically said that asking for immunity was proof that you had done something wrong when discussing Hillary Clinton's email scandal during the campaign. "When you are given immunity, that means that you have probably committed a crime," he told NBC's Chuck Todd in an interview.

  • Esme Cribb: Trump Will Sign Repeal of Obama-Era Internet Privacy Rules: The bill, which passed Congress on straight party votes, allows Internet service companies to track your on-line activity and sell that information to other companies without your permission or awareness.

  • Amy Davidson: Trump v. the Earth: About Trump's executive order to pretend that burning coal doesn't have any impact on the environment. Or, as Trump put it, "Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth":

    President Trump said that his order puts "an end to the war on coal." In reality, it is a declaration of war on the basic knowledge of the harm that burning coal, and other fossil fuels, can do. Indeed, it tells the government to ignore information. The Obama Administration assembled a working group to determine the "social cost" of each ton of greenhouse-gas emissions. Trump's executive order disbands that group and tosses out its findings. Scott Pruitt, the new E.P.A. administrator -- who, as attorney general of Oklahoma, had joined a lawsuit attempting to undo the endangerment finding -- announced that the agency was no longer interested in even collecting data on the quantities of methane that oil and gas companies release.

  • Robert Faturechi: Tom Price Intervened on Rule That Would Hurt Profits, the Same Day He Acquired Drug Stock: Actually $90k in stocks of six drug companies, so his payback would more closely model the industry-wide average. "Price was among lawmakers from both parties who signed onto a bill that would have blocked a rule proposed by the Obama administration, which was intended to remove the incentive for doctors to prescribe expensive drugs that don't necessarily improve patient outcomes." This was back when Price was in Congress, before joining Trump's cabinet. Related: Fired US Attorney Preet Bharara Said to Have Been Investigating HHS Secretary Tom Price; also When a Study Cast Doubt on a Heart Pill, the Drug Company Turned to Tom Price.

  • Ane Gearan: US leads major powers in protesting UN effort to ban nuclear weapons: Nikki Haley asks, "Is it any surprise that Iran is supportive of this?" Nearly every nation signed the NPT renouncing nuclear weapons on the understanding that the grandfathered nuclear powers would disarm as well -- something which hasn't happened, largely because the US feels it's important that someone like Donald Trump should have the option of blowing the world up.

  • Michelle Goldberg: Why Won't Republicans Resist Trump? That's the link headline. The article title is even funnier: "Where Are the Good Republicans?" We're talking about people in Congress whose singular mission over the past eight years (and this really dates back to the arrival of Newt Gingrich as House Speaker in 1995) has been to make Democrats look bad. They've refused to even consider Obama appointees. They passed bills to repeal the ACA fifty times but couldn't agree on anything to replace it with this year. They've tried to extort favors by holding the federal debt limit hostage. And when you ask them for anything they'd consider working with Obama on, the only things they can come up are points that would make Obama look bad to the Democratic Party base (like TPP, or more war). If any Republican member of Congress has felt the slightest twinge of shame over this behavior, he or she has done a good job of hiding it. And their bottom line is that Trump's, well, not their leader but their winner, the guy whose surprise win has allowed them to advance their agenda, which may have some more hopeful aims but for all practical purposes is to wreck, ruin and despoil America, to the detriment of nearly everyone who lives here. And really, the only examples we've seen so far of dissent within Republican ranks have come from the fringe right, who feel Trump and Ryan and McConnell aren't moving fast or hard enough toward the end times. Even there the media is struggling to salvage Republican reputations; see. e.g., Ross Barkan: Give Donald Trump credit: the Freedom Caucus really is terrible.

  • Malak Habbak: War Correspondents Describe Recent US Airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

  • Ben Hubbard/Michael R Gordon: US War Footprint Grows in Middle East, With No Endgame in Sight: Anyone who thought that Trump might tone down the War on Terror -- and I gave that non-zero but not very good odds -- has by now been thoroughly disabused of such wishful thinking:

    The United States launched more airstrikes in Yemen this month than during all of last year. In Syria, it has airlifted local forces to front-line positions and has been accused of killing civilians in airstrikes. In Iraq, American troops and aircraft are central in supporting an urban offensive in Mosul, where airstrikes killed scores of people on March 17.

    Two months after the inauguration of President Trump, indications are mounting that the United States military is deepening its involvement in a string of complex wars in the Middle East that lack clear endgames.

    Rather than representing any formal new Trump doctrine on military action, however, American officials say that what is happening is a shift in military decision-making that began under President Barack Obama. On display are some of the first indications of how complicated military operations are continuing under a president who has vowed to make the military "fight to win."

    The suggestion is that the only thing that has happened is that the military has been freed of whatever limiting or inhibitory role Obama played: Trump's basically given them carte blanche to keep doing what they've been doing so badly for years. On the other hand, Trump hasn't gotten involved enough to really screw things up with his "fight to win" slogan. The fact is the US hasn't "fought to win" since WWII for the simple reason that there's never been anything you could actually win by fighting. Rather, US military policy has been to make any challenge to US power and hegemony as painful as possible, to deter challengers from even raising the issue. Arguably, that has yielded diminishing returns as it's become increasingly obvious that US forces are vulnerable to asymmetric strategies (ranging from guerrilla war to "terrorism") and because the US has become increasingly inept at occupying hostile areas. Still, the solution to that problem isn't resolving to "fight to win" -- it's reducing the need to fight at all.

  • Charles Pierce: The Trump Administration Has Pushed the Limits of American Absurdity: If one were to teach a writing class, that title might be a good little assignment. I can imagine dozens of ways to approach it, all equally valid, and I'd still be surprised when Pierce handed in a piece with a piece starting with an Ignatius Donnelly quote. (And I'm one of the few people around who knows who Donnelly was, having read him as a teenager back before Paul Ryan, for instance, lost his mind in Ayn Rand.) Of course, Pierce soon moves on to more disturbing, although curiously mundane, realms of fantasy: namely Sean Spicer's press conferences.

  • Daniel Politi: Judge: Lawsuit Against Trump Can Proceed, Inciting Violence Isn't Protected Speech

  • David E Sanger/Eric Schmitt: Rex Tillerson to Lift Human Rights Conditions on Arms Sale to Bahrain

  • Jon Schwarz: Russia Investigation Heading Toward a Train Wreck Because Republicans Don't Care What Happened: Not a subject I'm at all partial to, mostly because it seems to cast a Cold War gloss on what strikes me as ordinary corruption, and partly because it skips over decades of stories about US interference in other peoples' politics, as well as the much more common (and I think damaging) Israeli efforts to steer American politics (anyone remember Netanyahu's campaigning for Romney, or his collusion with Boehner?). Still, if Republicans (and Democrats) learned anything from the Clinton years it's that unbridled investigations take on a life of their own, where being investigated is never a good omen.

    Unfortunately, on this planet we're on a trajectory to the worst possible outcome. It's now easy to imagine a future in which Trump and Russia become the millennials' equivalent of the John F. Kennedy assassination: A subject where no one can honestly be sure whether there was no conspiracy or a huge conspiracy, the underlying reality concealed by the thick murk of government secrecy, and progressives exhausting themselves for decades afterwards trying to prove what really happened.

  • Lisa Song: As Seas Around Mar-a-Lago Rise, Trump's Cuts Could Damage Local Climate Work: This is an amusing little piece. I've long thought that the people who should be most worried about global warming are the rich -- the people who own nearly all of the property endangered by climate change, especially from rising sea levels. Yet Republicans have been oblivious to the threats. They've convinced themselves of the importance of protecting the rights of individuals to practice predatory capitalism, and they pretty much completely deny that there can be any public interest separate from private profit-seeking (although they somehow believe that no those private interests are harmful to others, and that the sum of them must be good for everyone). I can't think of any idea more misguided and dangerous, but they've built not just an ideology but a political movement around it. I just wonder: when Mar-a-Lago is underwater, is Trump still going to be thrilled that those coal and oil magnates were able to make all that money?

  • Jessica Valenti: Mike Pence doesn't eat alone with women. That speaks volumes: Evidently, the VP can't pull his mind out of the gutter long enough to consider sharing a meal with a woman other than his wife. But then these are strange times, especially in the company Pence does keep:

    The same week the first lady gave a speech at the state department's International Women of Courage Awards, insisting: "We must continue to fight injustice in all its forms, in whatever scale or shape it takes in our lives," the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, chastised the veteran reporter April Ryan for "shaking her head" at him. (Just last month, Trump asked Ryan if the those in the Congressional Black Caucus were "friends" of hers.)

    While the president was asking a room full of women if they had ever heard of Susan B Anthony, the conservative Fox News host Bill O'Reilly was under fire for making a racist and sexist comment about the California congresswoman Maxine Waters' hair and an Iowa legislator said that if a pregnant woman found out her fetus has died, she should carry the pregnancy to term anyway.

    And while Pence trended on Twitter for his old-school sexism, what went largely unremarked on was that the vice-president cast the tie-breaking vote to push forward legislation that allows states to discriminate against Planned Parenthood and other healthcare providers that provide abortion when giving out federal Title X funds.

  • Matthew Yglesias: So far, Donald Trump as delivered almost nothing on his trade agenda:

    On trade, exactly nothing has happened. The long-dead TPP is still dead, but NAFTA is very much still with us. No new protective measures have been put in place, and American companies have been subject to no punitive retaliations. No legislation appears to be in the works.

    This status quo acknowledges rising anti-trade sentiment on the left and right by halting forward progress on any new trade and investment deals, while refusing to take the risk of altering any existing arrangements.

    Part of the reason is that those "existing arrangements" all have big business supporters, especially among the Goldman-Sachs wing of the Trump administration, whereas Trump has yet to pick an unemployed auto-worker or coal miner for any post of influence (they shot their wad on Nov. 9 and won't get another chance for four years). Yglesias doesn't mention the "border adjustment tax" here, but it does show up in The 7 big questions Republicans have to answer on tax reform. Taxes look to be the next big Congressional battle for Trump and Ryan, and their proposals are likely to be every bit as unpopular as what they came up with for health care. Again, their problem won't be Republicans coming to their senses, but ones who want to seize the opportunity to make things even worse. At least you can't say you weren't warned.

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still to America's bout of political insanity:

  • Eric Alterman: The Perception of Liberal Bias in the Newsroom Has Nothing Whatsoever to Do With Reality: Unlike, say, the conservative bias in the board rooms. But even that oversimplifies the story. Conservative scapegoating both presses and seduces the media, with its completely normal self-image as fair and objective, into legitimizing outrageous claims from the right and gives viewers/listeners/readers a readymade excuse to doubt everything they see/hear/read. Moreover, it's not entirely wrong. The fact is no one can be free from biases any more than one can escape experience or language. Critical self-reflection helps, as does a willingness to question one's own precepts. A friend recently asked me how these days one can figure out who to trust. My reaction is that I never trust anyone beyond what I can make sense of and verify. If, for instance, you told me that cutting marginal tax rates on the rich would make the economy grow in ways that helped people beyond those who saved on their tax bills, I could look for test cases and see how they turned out. Same if you told me that spending more money on the military would make it less likely that a country would be attacked by others. It so happens that there is a lot of evidence on both of these questions, and the evidence strongly disputes the assertions. If you look at many such questions, you may start to think that some sources are more trustworthy than others, but you should never cease to question them, especially when they don't make sense.

    To take a slightly different perspective, and I find it often helps to try to refocus from different angles, I've been worrying about (and distrusting) "liberal bias" since the mid-1960s, when liberals tended to take political positions I disagreed with (like supporting the US war in Vietnam). Liberals back then had an active fantasy life, as they in some cases still have today (e.g., their obsession with Russia). Both then and now it's fairly easy to pick apart issues where they are wrong and where their errors are self-serving (the Russia thing seems to be a way Clinton-supporters can avoid the shortcomings of their candidate). It shouldn't be surprising that conservatives are pretty adept at spotting and exploiting cases where liberals spin things to their own advantage. Nor vice versa -- perspective often gets clearer from a distance. Still, in reality, bias and interest isn't symmetrical between right and left, and it is a grave error to think otherwise. The right, by definition, serves private interests, often at the expense of the public. The left takes the opposite tack, favoring the broadest class interest over the most elite. We should at least be able to agree on that much, but the right has struggled mightily to confuse the issue, not least with their charges that the media is rife with "liberal bias."

    To understand this, you need to recognize that America was founded on liberal (Enlightenment) principles, notably on the notion that "all men are born equal" and share "equal rights under the law," a law meant to advance "the common welfare" and which is vouchsafed through a system of democracy. And those principles have been so internalized that even the right, which at all times has defended the claims of "virtuous elites" to rule over everyone else, has had to pay lip-service to democracy and to argue that their self-serving policies benefit some greater good. To do so they've dressed up their rhetoric with all sorts of market-tested claims, often disguising themselves as "populists" while practicing their art of divide-and-conquer -- flattering one part of the demos as the only true Americans while derogating others as deservedly inferior. And the more their claims fail, the harder they work as obfuscating their failures. One way they've done this has been to convince their followers that any unseemly facts are the product of "liberal bias." Of course, such charges ring hollow to anyone who's bothered to examine the right's own agenda, but thus far they've gotten quite a bit of mileage out of this ruse. To get an idea of how much, consider the Occupy Wall Street formulation that divides us between a 1% (which is clearly the orientation of the Republican platform) and the remaining 99%. If politics were understood this way, the Republicans should never win an election, yet somehow they manage to keep their share around 30% (vs. a more/less equal 30% for the Democrats and 40% for those who don't vote). Of course, relatively even results aren't solely due to the skill of Republican machinations -- many Democrats, including Obama and the Clintons, seem to be very cozy with the 1% and have a mediocre record of serving the 99%, both making them vulnerable to the "populist" ploys of a Trump.

  • Dean Baker: Trade Denialism Continues: Trade Really Did Kill Manufacturing Jobs: Rebuts and debunks "a flood of opinion pieces and news stories in recent weeks wrongly telling people that it was not trade that led to the loss of manufacturing jobs in recent years, but rather automation." Baker also wrote The Fed's Interest Rate Hike Will Prevent People From Getting Jobs.

  • Pepe Escobar: North Korea: The really serious options on the table

  • Chris Hayes: Policing the Colony: From the American Revolution to Ferguson: Adapted from Hayes' new book, A Colony in a Nation, on the persistence of racism in America, explained by the tendency to even now treat black people as something different from equal citizens under the law. One sample paragraph:

    In Ferguson, people were enraged at Michael Brown's death and grieving at his passing, but more than anything else they were sick and tired of being humiliated. At random, I could take my microphone and offer it to a black Ferguson resident, young or old, who had a story of being harassed and humiliated. A young honors student and aspiring future politician told me about watching his mother be pulled over and barked at by police. The local state senator told me that when she was a teenager, a police officer drew a gun on her because she was sitting in a fire truck -- at a fireman's invitation. At any given moment, a black citizen of Ferguson might find himself shown up, dressed down, made to stoop and cower by the men with badges.

  • John Judis: Can Donald Trump Revive American Manufacturing? An Interview With High-Tech Expert Rob Atkinson: Short answer: well, someone could, but clearly not Donald Trump.

  • Greg Kaufmann: A Cruel New Bill Is About to Become Law in Mississippi: "Legislation passed this week would enrich a private contractor while throwing people off public assistance." Not Trump's fault, per se, but another example of the Republicans at work, preying on the poor.

  • Richard D Wolff: Capitalism Produced Trump: Another Reason to Move Beyond It

  • Democratic Mega-donor Saban Doesn't Rule Out Hillary Clinton 2020 Run: More proof that cluelessness is endemic among billionaires.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, March 26, 2017

Weekend Roundup

We went to two funerals on Saturday: the first for long-time peace and justice activist Mary Harren (91), the second for my last uncle, James Hull (85), who spent 26 years as a mechanic in the Air Force, and was well known to Wichita Eagle readers as a right-wing crank. Main thing I was struck by was the difference in the crowds: close to 300 turned out for Mary, compared to about fifteen (not counting the Color Guard you taxpayers provided) for James. The former was quite properly a celebration of a long and fruitful life. The latter was rather sad, bitter, and pathetic.

We spent much more time with Mary over the last fifteen years: she was one of the first to welcome us to Wichita's small cadre of anti-war activists; she was quick to visit whenever we ran into troubles; and she was a frequent (and delightful) dinner guest. But she was so active and engaged that even while she made you feel special, you knew that she had dozens of other people and groups she did the same for. And she had been doing this for ages, sometimes regaling us with stories of political struggle over events I only vaguely remember from my teen years.

My interaction with James dates from those same years. Seems like he spent most of the 1950s stationed elsewhere -- Germany and somewhere near Las Vegas are places that stuck in my mind, although he joined in 1950 so was involved in Korea -- but after 1960 he was mostly based at McConnell AFB here in Wichita, and his family stayed here through two tours in Vietnam. After I turned 17 he lobbied me hard to sign up, but by then I was resolutely opposed to the Vietnam War and detested pretty much everything related to the military, so he was one of the first people I can recall arguing with about politics. (I was so withdrawn I'd scarcely speak to anyone, but he was so unflappable you couldn't help but argue with him.) After I moved away from Wichita, I had very little to do with him: while he was always very affable and loved a good (even a dirty) joke, his wife (Bobbie Ann) had terrified me as a child, and was so dim-witted and erratic I actively avoided her (and less actively their two shell-shocked sons -- the younger was what we used to call retarded; he wound up in some kind of special care facility and died at age 21). But I did run into him a few years ago, after Bobbie Ann had died, and he was cheerful as ever. He gave me a book he had written: a memoir plus a compilation of poems and political letters and a piece of his "scholarly" research which claimed that American economic performance correlates with frequency of executions, so to get the country moving again we should execute more felons.

He titled his memoir I Survived!, but there was virtually nothing in it about his wife or sons, so it's hard to imagine readers without personal knowledge making sense of his point. His work, and his bowling, and probably even his politics, make more sense as an escape from a disappointing home life. One pleasing thing about the funeral was that the pastor was a neighbor and friend, as was another person who spoke. So they made an effort to talk about the actual man rather than wander off into the hereafter. And they pretty much agreed that the man himself was a difficult, cranky person to be around.

The most revealing story was one where the pastor asked James what he had been doing today, and James answered "spreading hate and discontent." Asked what he had done yesterday, James answered the same, as he did when asked what he was planning on doing tomorrow. I'm not sure exactly what he thought he meant by that, but his politics was rooted in state violence, something he celebrated both in war and in his obsession over executions. Hate just greases the skids toward violence, which is part of why Trump has escalated the killing in places like Yemen and Syria despite claiming he opposes the disastrous wars Bush and Obama led. You can't sustain those wars without engendering and feeding off a lot of hate.

Another possibility was that James was conscious of how he rubbed people wrong with his crackpot theories. He did on occasion joke about the Secret Service coming after him after letters he wrote to the president. I suspect that in some cases he was contrarian for its own sake. Indeed, like with my father, his sense of humor was often rooted in irony against invisible foes. Still, at some point his right-wing bent hardened, probably egged on by the Fox News cabal. (Several people commented on how every time they saw him he had Fox News blaring -- his father and mine were very hard of hearing, and having worked around jet engines for many years I'm sure he was too.) That he wound up bitter and cranky and full of "hate and discontent" was, I think, baked into his political bent. The contrast to Mary couldn't have been more stark. She was probably every bit as critical of the world as he, but everything she did was imbued with hope and love. Even toward the end, she was full of grace. His pastor talked about grace, too, but it seemed like a long shot for James.

By the way, speaking of crowd numbers, there also was a "Make America Great" rally for Trump on Saturday. The Eagle's headline on the story was Dozens brave cold winds to rally for Trump. Not sure if the numbers are exaggerated, but the adverse weather sure was.

I got into a bit of a Facebook argument with Art Protin, who had posted a meme-pic showing the left half of Hillary Clinton's head and the caption (imagine in all caps): "The next time someone tries to tell you that Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate, remind them that it took the RNC, Wikileaks, the FBI and Russia to narrowly bring her down in an election she won by nearly 3 million votes." Being a reality-based sort of guy, my initial response was to list a dozen or so areas where she had acted or had taken positions that proved detrimental to most Americans, as if voters had been rational in rejecting her. That's not quite it, although we certainly shouldn't neglect the fact that, rightly or wrongly, she's picked up a lot of unfavorable baggage over the years, and that she's been the target of an awful lot of focused political hate -- both personally and due to her association with two Democratic administrations that promised much and delivered little to their neediest supporters. Those things worked to weaken her credibility and to tarnish her integrity, and that's the main thing we mean when we describe her as a weak candidate.

But really, the more glaring proof of her weakness is that she lost to DONALD J. TRUMP, who even before the election had the most negative approval ratings of any major party candidate ever, and who afterwards was subject to the greatest "buyer's remorse" we've seen since Nixon in 1972. Clearly, a lot of people hated Clinton so much that they voted for a guy they didn't like instead. I think a lot of factors entered into that choice, and I don't think any of them were very rational. (Sure, she's dishonest and corrupt and much more, but is she worse in any of these respects than Donald Trump? That comparison should have been laughably easy, yet somehow lots of people didn't realize it.) Given all of the points one could make against Trump, it's pretty much axiomatic that anyone who could still lose to him was an awfully weak candidate.

The meme also has several other faults. Leave aside the RNC for the moment, the other three forces arrayed against Clinton are/were pretty lame: Wikileaks, the FBI, and Russia. What Wikileaks did was one-sided (does anyone doubt that a hack of the RNC would have made them look like buffoons?) and Comey's dredging up of the whole email mess was unfortunate, but it's hard to believe that they had any more than the tiniest of impacts. And I have no idea what Russia did (beyond the DNC hack, and that's not clear) other than to soften the heads of some DNC types, who thought that red-baiting Trump as soft on Putin would be an easy score -- I can't prove it, but I think the net effect was to make Hillary look more recklessly hawkish, and that was something that hurt her. Of course, the continuing Russia obsession of frustrated Hillary-bots means something else: how hard it is to them to admit that they might bear any blame for policies or organization or candidate. Indeed, the whole meme is just another instance of scapegoating.

The three million vote margin is also at risk of being overplayed. Sure, it points to a structural problem (which Republicans will never allow to be fixed), but the problem is not just the structure for how it has been gamed, not least by the Democrats. Trump supporters can point out that they lost in states where they hardly campaigned at all (New York, Illinois, especially California), but the same was true for the 20-30 states Clinton didn't campaign in at all (including a couple she thought she'd carry): the net result being that the popular vote is bogus both ways. I think the net result is a wash, so Trump's failure to gain a plurality is a leading indicator of his unpopularity, but that only gets you so far. As Trump likes to say, "I'm president, and you're not." So while it properly embarrasses him that he only got paltry inauguration crowds, that his rallies regularly play to empty seats, and that he can only get 80 marchers out on a Spring day here in Wichita, it doesn't amount to much.

Biggest story this week was the demise of Paul Ryan's health care bill, which Donald Trump had pledged full allegiance to. Some links:

  • Ross Barken: Trump tried to burn down Obamacare. He set his hair on fire instead

  • Zoë Carpenter: Donald Trump Can't Make a Deal: "Now that the GOP's health-care bill is dead, plan B is to sabotage Obamacare."

  • Michelle Goldberg: The Biggest Lesson From the Trumpcare Debacle: "It showed us how government by misogynists actually translates into policy." This fits in with a picture that's been going around, depicting the "diverse group of people" brought together to craft the bill -- all white males, about equally divided between those with pattern baldness and not.

  • Paul Krugman: The Scammers, the Scammed and America's Fate: Krugman's favorite sport is "I told you so," and he's been telling us that Ryan is a fraud for many years now -- he cites a 2010 post called The Flimflam Man -- so he understands that this is no time to let up. He notes how the media has repeatedly promoted Ryan, and he think that this is due to "the convention of 'balance'." "This meant, in particular, that when it came to policy debates one was always supposed to present both sides as having equally well-founded arguments." I suspect that the truth is crasser: that Ryan was a pet project of the Kochs and their think-tanks long before you heard of him, and the people backing him have ever since been whispering in the ears of media managers and pundits.

  • Tom McCarthy: Health insurance woes helped elect Trump, but his cure may be more painful: Some Republicans, including most of the so-called Freedom Caucus who torpedoed the Ryan-Trump bill, believe that any form of government regulation in the health care markets is improper, that people should not be required to have insurance, that businesses should be free to sell any form of insurance (even policies that don't cover anything). Moreover, such people have no idea what such a world would look like, in part because nothing like that has ever been allowed in America. But most Republicans have done this hand-waving thing, arguing that if they were in power they'd "replace and repeal" Obamacare with something which would be so much better for everyone: that costs would go down and care would improve and everyone would be better off. They've never detailed how that might work, because they've never been in a position to pass it, until now, when it turns out that their proposals would quite obviously, one way or another, make it all worse. And this is not just health care: Republicans often feel the need to argue that their proposals will benefit everyone, even when it's clear that they'll be massively harmful.

  • Alice Ollstein: Trump to House GOP: Vote Yes on O'Care Repeal or Lose Your Seat: Early-week threat from the White House. Trump campaigned in the primaries on a relatively heterodox (or schizophrenic?) platform, but wound up stuck with a straight Republican Congress (well, actually one that is split between a hardcore conservative majority and an even more extreme right-wing faction), with virtually no personal commitment to the president. The effect is to allow him to pivot only one direction (right), which means he can only pass what they let him pass. So there's always been this fleeting fancy that Trump might try to steer the party his direction by purging uncooperative Republicans in the primaries. So that's sort of what's going on here, except that Trump didn't produce his own health care bill -- he acceded to Ryan's bill -- and most of the successful primary challenges lately have come from the right (Tim Huelskamp in Kansas was a rare exception, but he was very far out, and specifically his extreme anti-government stance offended agribusiness interests, who control damn near all of the economy in his district). So it's interesting that Trump made this threat, but it didn't work, and now seems pretty hollow.

    Another view of the purge story is: Daniel Politi: Bannon Pushed Trump to Use Health Care Vote to Write Up "Enemies List": After all, if Republicans only understand one big thing, it's how to exploit a list of enemies.

  • Amber Phillips: Donald Trump is giving a lot of mixed messages about whom to blame on health care; or pretty much the same thing: Joanna Walters: Trump blames everyone but himself for failure of GOP healthcare legislation.

  • Andrew Prokop: On health reform, Donald Trump followed Republican leaders into a ditch: Many of these pieces assume that Trump promised something better (even "really great") and got blind-sided by Ryan. More likely is that Trump never could care about health care, and was only mouthing words (including blatant lies) fed to him by right-wing propagandists, because that's easier than actually thinking.

  • Heather Richardson: The showdown that exposed the rift between Republican ideology and reality:

    Republicans have been able to paper over the vast gulf between their ideology and reality, so long as they could blame Democrats for their inability to put their ideology into law. They could rail about lower taxes and liberty, and then, when Democrats saved the policies that voters liked, could blame the socialistic Democrats for Republicans' own failure to enact their ideological vision. This tactic was at the heart of their rage against Obamacare, the symbol of their oppression since it passed seven years ago. Republicans in the House of Representatives voted more than 50 times to repeal the law, knowing they could count on Obama's veto to protect them from voters who would, in reality, be furious at the loss of their healthcare. . . .

    The initial draft of the bill reflected Republican ideological principles by giving the wealthiest Americans an $880bn tax cut. Even still, its retention of government regulations on healthcare were too much for purists. Members of the far-right Freedom Caucus insisted that the government must not interfere in healthcare, defending the principle that the law must be repealed entirely to resurrect American liberty. Other members of Congress, swamped by popular outcry against repeal, had to bow to reality: Americans actually like the law.

    The showdown over Obamacare finally brought into the open the fundamental rift between Republican ideology and reality. Speaker Ryan and President Trump tried to skirt that gulf by forcing the bill through in an astonishing 17 days. When that failed, Trump tried to bluster it out with the old Republican narrative, blaming Democrats, who are in the minority, for this epic failure. Neither worked. Since 1980, the Republican party has won power by hiding its unpopular ideology under a winning narrative, and reality has finally intruded.

    Also see: Matthew Sheffield: Downfall of a policy wonk: Paul Ryan becomes the latest victim of the American right's fundamental dysfunction.

Some more scattered links this week in the Trump swamp:

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still to America's bout of political insanity:

  • Dean Baker: Why the NY Times Is Chiefly Responsible for the Mass Ignorance About the US Budget

  • Steven A Cook/Michael Brooks: Bill Maher makes us dumber: How ignorance, fear and stupid pop-culture clichés shape Americans' view of the Middle East: "Americans used to be just ignorant about Muslims and the Middle East. Now we're also fearful, stupid and wrong."

  • Richard Falk: The Inside Story on Our UN Report Calling Israel an Apartheid State

  • Frank Rich: No Sympathy for the Hillbilly: Alerted to this piece by a Matt Karp tweet: "Elite liberals keep writing about sympathy because they have no concept of solidarity." Headline-wise this reinforces stereotypes as much about New York liberals as about hillbillies, Down in the text Rich cites various (mostly right-wing) studies complaining that hillbillies are morally degenerate (Charles Murray, really?). Not that Rich is really that stupid -- I can't object to his pull quote, "Instead of studying how to talk to 'real people,' might Democrats start talking about real people?" Also, this starts out accurate enough before plunging over the deep end:

    Trump voters should also be reminded that the elite of the party they've put in power is as dismissive of them as Democratic elites can be condescending. "Forget your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap," Kevin Williamson wrote of the white working class in National Review. "The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible." He was only saying in public what other Republicans like Mitt Romney say about the "47 percent" in private when they think only well-heeled donors are listening. Besides, if National Review says that their towns deserve to die, who are Democrats to stand in the way of Trump voters who used their ballots to commit assisted suicide?

    The problem here is that the Republicans aren't the only political party who have written off the vast expanses of America outside the mostly coastal urban areas. The Democrats offer a bit more generous "safety net" but they still make it look and smell like welfare, and with their trade deals and bank deregulation and indifference to unions (which in any case are out of reach to most workers) the Democrats been as complicit in the decline of the heartland as the Republicans. The main difference is that Republicans have been much more successful at blaming Democrats for policies that both parties' elites support, at least in "red states" where Democrats have abandoned and no longer campaign in -- partly due to the ascendancy of snobs like Rich, and partly from sheer expediency.

Got a late start on this, so it feels more scattered than usual. So much crap to deal with these days. So little time.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Chuck Berry died. Jimmy Breslin died. My uncle, James Hull, died. It's been one of those weeks.

The big thing Trump did this week was to release a new budget proposal. Some reactions:

  • Who Wins and Loses in Trump's Proposed Budget; also The 62 agencies and programs Trump wants to eliminate.

  • A grim budget day for US science: analysis and reaction to Trump's plan: E.g., "NIH cuts could mean no new grants in 2016."

  • Graham Bowley: What if Trump Really Does End Money for the Arts? Public arts funding has been a political hot potato for many years now, so it's not surprising that conservative churls would take this opportunity to slash it, indeed to cut it out altogether. I could nitpick myself, but I also recall that during the 1930s the WPA financed all sorts of public art, some of which we're still fortunate enough to enjoy. One cannot even imagine government funding programs like that today, but if you give it a wee bit of thought, you might wonder why. Given today's technology, the ability to digitize sound and vision, to reproduce and disseminate those bits at zero marginal cost, there has never been a better time to make a big public investment in the arts. Sure, we need to come up with a funding scheme that isn't subject to arbitrary commissars, but the costs and risks are almost trivial. Especially compared to the Defense Department; after all, without art and entertainment, what is there left to defend?

  • David S Cohen: Trump's Budget Is Pure Cruel Conservatism

  • Jeff Daniels: Rural America and farm sector to take a hit with Trump's budget plan

  • Zaid Jilani: Trump the Outsider Outsources His Budget to Insider Think Tank: Explores how "many of the White House proposal's ideas are identical to a budget blueprint Heritage drew up last year." Also quotes from a statement put out by Heritage praising the Trump budget, with one little demur: "it complained that Trump's call for an additional $54 billion in defense spending just isn't big enough."

  • Eric Levitz: White House Says Cutting Meals on Wheels is 'Compassionate': Quote comes from White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, who you'll read more about elsewhere. Levitz also wrote 6 Promises That President Trump's Budget Betrays.

  • Charles Pierce: This Is the Ending Conservatives Always Wanted:

    This budget is short-sighted, cruel to the point of being sadistic, stupid to the point of pure philistinism, and shot through with the absolute and fundamentalist religious conviction that the only true functions of government are the ones that involve guns, and that the only true purpose of government is to serve the rich. . . .

    A lot of this is going to make the members of Congress choke, so a lot of it may not pass. Its very existence is important, though, as a document that lays out quite clearly the vision of government shared almost everywhere in modern conservatism. This is a DeMint Budget, a Heritage Budget, a Gingrich Budget, a Reagan Budget, and a Tea Party Budget. It may be crude and lack a certain polish, but its priorities and goals are clear. There is no modern Republican Party without movement conservatism, and this budget is the most vivid statement yet of that philosophy.

    By the way, Piece also wrote: Chuck Berry and Jimmy Breslin Reinvented the English Language.

  • Jordan Weissmann: Trump's Budget Director Has a Breathtakingly Cynical Excuse for Cutting Aid to the Poor

  • Matthew Yglesias: Trump's budget blueprint is a war on the future of the American economy: I caught a whiff here of Robert Reich's old scheme for education transforming American workers into highly paid "symbolic manipulators" -- sure, boring old manufacturing jobs get stripped due to "free trade" deals, but we'll all wind up richer than ever. That was bullshit then and is bullshit now, but that doesn't mean the opposite is even close to right: you don't need Friedman to realize that business today requires more technical skill than ever before, and the future more so. So why would anyone push a government budget that seriously undermines scientific research and education?

    But Trump's rhetoric, and now his spending blueprint, don't just push back against techno-utopianism. They constitute a denial of the obvious truth that a prosperous society is necessarily going to be one that is evolving and changing over time. . . .

    One of the main things that was good about the "good old days" is that they were a time of massive progress, expansion of higher education opportunities into the middle class and rapid development of new products and cures. This happened while the government invested more -- not less -- on health, education, science, and regional development.

    Didn't Trump spend much of his campaign complaining about how we've neglected essential investments in infrastructure? Science, research and engineering are what infrastructure is built on, and education is fundamental to all that.

Some scattered links this week in the Trumpiverse:

  • Zoë Carpenter/George Zornick: Everything Trump Did in His 8th Week That Really Matters:

    • Released a very skinny budget.
    • Moved to loosen fracking rules.
    • Delayed chemical-safety regulations.
    • Fired 46 US Attorneys nationwide.
    • Made a formal apology to United Kingdom over wild spying claims.
    • Put military action against North Korea on the table.

  • Doug Bandow: Why Is Trump Abandoning the Foreign Policy that Brought Him Victory? Starts by pointing out that Trump was often critical of the neoconservatives who had plunged America into endless war, quoting him as saying, "unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct." Indeed, many single-issue neocons like the Kagans were quick to flock to Hillary Clinton, trusting her record for hawkishness. Still, although Trump has been able to torpedo much bruited nominations for the likes of John Bolton and Elliott Abrams, his administration has done a lot of sabre-rattling so far. But the author ("a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan") has a selective memory of Trump's campaign -- he also insisted he'd crush ISIS and increase military spending. Unlike anti-war conservatives (like Justin Raimondo) who fell for Trump's promise, I actually considered him more bellicose and more dangerous than Clinton (and I've repeatedly attacked her on just this issue). The reasons: the Republicans Trump would surround himself with would be more consistently hawkish (many Democrats have better things to do), and Trump himself is ignorant of and prejudiced about the world, and much given to macho posturing. A good example of this is the rapidly developing crisis with North Korea; e.g., see two recent Jason Ditz pieces: Tillerson: North Korea Diplomacy Has Failed, and Tillerson: Attacking North Korea Remains an Option; also Charles P Pierce: Don't Poke North Korea with a Stick Just to See What Will Happen.

  • Michelle Chen: Trump's Obsession With Cutting Regulations Will Make America Sick

  • Julie Hirschfield Davis: Trump, Day After Merkel's Visit, Says Germany Pays NATO and US Too Little: Trump's been complaining for some time about NATO member not paying enough for their common defense, and he's sent Rex Tillerson out to shake down America's supposed allies, so this isn't exactly new. There's much Trump doesn't understand, but one thing is that a big part of the reason the US has so many subservient allies is that the US pays for the deference, not just in allowing the US to base troops on foreign soil but in ways like generous trade deals that help countries develop through exports. Take those perks away and won't people start wondering whether it's all worth it?

  • Allegra Kirkland: Huck: Trump Should Ignore Travel Ban Ruling, Like Jackson With Trail of Tears: Says a lot when you take inspiration from one of the most shameful facts in American history, but that's where many Republicans are at: until they manage to stock the courts with like-minded conservatives, they invite like-minded executives to run amuck over niceties like law and constitution. Not clear that Trump, a man who has put a lot of stock into using the courts for his own gains, is there yet, or that if he was he wouldn't be facing a widespread revolt from civil servants forced to choose between the legal system and his executive ego.

  • Ezra Klein: Does Donald Trump know what the GOP health bill does? Conclusion: "maybe not"; more to the point: "the AHCA does literally none of the things Trump says it does."

  • Nancy LeTourneau: Checking in on Trump's 'Contract With the American Voter': This is becoming a staple piece on the left, dredging up Trump campaign promises and showing how few of them -- especially the relatively decent ones -- have been implemented, or even followed up on. This doesn't seem to phase Trump's actual supporters yet: they have, after all, almost by definition become jaded cynics about the political process, leaving them more inclined to see Trump's failures as subversion by unseen forces. On the other hand, LeTourneau's list includes a lot of "not introduced" Acts, which goes to show how the Republicans in Congress have proceeded their own agenda, regardless of how that fits in with Trump's own promises. Ryan, in particular, seems to view Trump as his stooge, aided by the fact that Trump is too lazy to work on his own agenda, and too hamstrung by the people he's allowed himself to be surrounded by. Still, I suspect the day is coming when we'll consider ourselves lucky anytime Trump breaks a campaign promise.

  • Josh Marshall: He Seems Nice: Irony still in plan: "he" is Greg Knox, described in a Pence tweet as "a small biz owner hurting under Obamacare." So here's some context: "It shows Knox to be what policy specialists refer to as a 'toxic right wing asshole.'"

  • Ian Millhiser: Paul Ryan says he fantasized about cutting health care for the poor at his college keggers: "Meet the most insufferable frat boy in human history."

  • Tessa Stuart: Four Things We Learned About Trump's Tax Returns From Rachel Maddow: Explained much more succinctly than what you got from watching Maddow's program.

  • Amy B Wang: Why Trump's plan to slash UN funding could lead to global calamity

  • Paul Woodward: Donald Trump's deceitful and misleading statements have consequences: This keys off a long quote from John Cassidy: Donald Trup Finally Pays a Price for His False and Reckless Words, but I found Woodward's commentary more to the point:

    Donald Trump could accurately assert: "I didn't get where I am today by being honest."

    Like many people who believe in the supremacy of will power, he may believe that being faithful to ones own interests and objectives is all that matters.

    Trump is consistent in his unwillingness to bend to the will of others. His America First policy is merely an inflation of his Trump First practice.

    The idea that Trump might have the capacity to mend his ways -- to see that his dishonesty no longer works -- derives, perhaps, from a misreading of his pragmatism.

    Trump isn't bound to any ideology. At the same time, he exhibits no psychological flexibility whatsoever.

    Trump believes in his own innate capabilities with which, in his own imagining, he is so richly endowed he has no need to learn anything.

    This reminds me a bit of another president not bound to any ideology: Franklin Roosevelt. The difference, of course, was that Roosevelt did learn from his mistakes. He saw, for instance, that his more conservative impulses -- especially his fetish for balanced budgets -- were harmful, while his more generous, more liberal, impulses worked much better. The result was the most progressive administration in American history, but few voters imagined that at the start. They simply wanted to try something different, because the reign of Andrew Mellon and his three presidents had been so disastrous. The election of Trump was based on much the same reaction, but less decisive because disaster was much less universally recognized (let alone commonly understood) in 2016, and because quite a few people understood that Trump and/or the Republicans didn't offer any real solutions -- indeed, they were major problems.

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still to America's bout of political insanity:

  • Patrick Cockburn: Yemen Is a Complicated and Unwinnable War. Trump Should Stay Out. Should, but thus far Yemen is the war Trump has most dramatically inserted himself in.

  • Tom Engelhardt: How the Invasion of Iraq Came Home: Actually, his third-tier title, after "Walled In" and "President Blowback." I'm not sure "blowback" is correct, because most of the damage done to America since Trump took office has been self-inflicted: the problem is less that others are attacking so much as we've internalized the scars of fifteen-years of the shocks of war:

    It's clear, however, that his urge to create a garrison state went far beyond a literal wall. It included the build-up of the U.S. military to unprecedented heights, as well as the bolstering of the regular police, and above all of the border police. Beyond that lay the urge to wall Americans off in every way possible. His fervently publicized immigration policies (less new, in reality, than they seemed) should be thought of as part of a project to construct another kind of "great wall," a conceptual one whose message to the rest of the world was striking: You are not welcome or wanted here. Don't come. Don't visit.

    All this was, in turn, fused at the hip to the many irrational fears that had been gathering like storm clouds for so many years, and that Trump (and his alt-right companions) swept into the already looted heartland of the country. In the process, he loosed a brand of hate (including shootings, mosque burnings, a raft of bomb threats, and a rise in hate groups, especially anti-Muslim ones) that, historically speaking, was all-American, but was nonetheless striking in its intensity in our present moment.

    TomDispatch also published Michael Klare: Winning World War II in the Twenty-First Century, on Trump's nostalgia for the days when America actually won wars -- ignoring that times have changed as pre-WWII empires have been rolled back on every front, and that the US is no longer viewed as a country normally content to mind its own business, that only joins wars when attacked, and that doesn't plot to keep and plunder other nations. Indeed, the real problems the US military face today aren't the sort that can be fixed with a few more ships, planes, and troops.

  • Matea Gold: The Mercers and Stephen Bannon: How a populist power base was funded and built: Robert Mercer is a hedge fund exec, the plural evidently refers to daughter Rebekah, and the article goes into some depth on how they've sowed their millions to promote right-wing causes, especially through Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

    While other donors gave more to support Trump's presidential bid last year, the Mercers are now arguably the most influential financiers of the Trump era. Bannon, who went on to manage the final months of Trump's campaign before joining the White House, is the senior architect of the president's policy vision. He is joined in the West Wing by counselor Kellyanne Conway, a friend of Rebekah Mercer who led the family-funded super PAC that backed first Cruz and then Trump in the 2016 race.

    People who know them say the Mercers, who soured on traditional political operatives, appreciated Bannon's business savvy and share his belief that the conversation around politics must be changed for their ideas to prevail. For all of their power and privilege, both the family and their longtime adviser see themselves as outsiders, fighting the grip of elite institutions.

    One thing I was surprised by here was a $4 million donation to John Bolton Super PAC. I wasn't aware of such a thing, but it probably explains why such a useless and incompetent buffoon keeps managing to get his name in the news.

    Gold also wrote a comparable analysis of the Kochs (in 2014): Koch-backed political network, built to shield donors, raised $400 million in 2012 elections; also co-wrote one on the Clintons (in 2015): Two Clintons. 41 Years. $3 Billion.

  • William Greider: Here's What You Need to Know About the Federal Reserve: "We demand way too much from the central bank -- but that's because our elected politicians have done almost nothing to revive the economy." The Federal Reserve raised short-term interest rates last week, in an effort to throttle back the economy lest it grow to the point where wages actually start to rise. That would normally be bad news for a sitting president, but not for the bankers who sit with this particular one.

    Greider also wrote: Trump Is Fighting a New Trade War -- and This One Is Intramural, about the "nasty White House battle [that] has broken out between right-wing nationalists and globalist financiers," asking the question: "Who owns this president -- the folks who voted for him, or the power hitters of big business and banking?" That's actually a novel question for a Republican president: with leaders like the Bushes, Republican voters were merely consenting to oligarchic rule, but didn't Trump promise something else? I'm not sure, but given how readily Clinton and Obama turned against their voters, I hardly expect Trump to show much spine.

  • Eric Levitz: The Case for Countering Right-Wing Populism With 'Left-Wing Economics': Article spends too much time rebutting a red herring from Zack Beauchamp. My own suspicion is that the key to making an "Left-Wing Economics" argument work is to name enemies and show how those enemies take unfair advantage of working people, especially through their bought influence on government, how their lobbying perverts the course of justice. Not that we needed more examples, but the Trump administration is rife with them. (Trump sure had a field day painting the Clintons that way.)

  • Richard Silverstein: Knesset Votes to Ban Palestinian Parties, Destroy Israeli Democracy: In 1951 Palestinians still residing in Israel were granted citizenship (a right that was not extended after 1967 as Israel occupied and in some cases annexed additional Palestinian land), and since then Palestinian political parties have been represented in Israel's parliament (Knesset) -- to little effect, of course, as ruling coalitions have very rarely even considered including them, but it's always been a talking point, a big part of the Israel's claim to be a democracy.

    This paragraph is meant as an aside, but is noteworthy:

    Coincidentally, today a UN body issued a report finding that Israel had become an apartheid state. It further urged that the UN reactivate the methods, resolutions and commissions it used to ostracize South Africa, when it too faced international opprobrium for its racist policies. The new version of the Basic Law further strengthens such findings.

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Sunday, March 12, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Donald Trump likes to talk about how he "inherited a mess": here's one measure of that, a chart of private-sector payroll employment over Obama's eight years:

Note first that the guy who really did inherit a mess was Obama, following eight years of Republican misrule under GW Bush. Also, that by ignoring cuts to public sector employment due to austerity measures mostly (but not exclusively) pushed by Republicans, this overstates the overall jobs gains a bit. Still, Trump's going to be hard-pressed to sustain Obama's rate, given hat he's working with the same "wrecking crew" that sunk Bush. Of course, you may not know all this, because Obama spent very little time bitching about the hole Republicans dug for him: he felt it important to recovery to project confidence, so he consistently understated the recession early on. In doing so, he did himself (and the country) a disservice, as he undercut the political case for more emphatic reforms.

Dean Baker reviews the latest jobs figures: Prime-Age Employment Rate Hits New High for Recovery in February. On the other hand, no false modesty from Trump: Trump keeps claiming he's created US jobs since Election Day. As the title continues: "Not so." Also: Spicer: Trump Says Formerly 'Phony' Jobs Numbers Are Now 'Very Real' For more, see Matthew Yglesias: Sean Spicer's appalling answer about economic data shows how far we've lowered the bar for Trump. Spicer's quip: "They may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now."

Some scattered links this week in the Trumpiverse:

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still to America's bout of political insanity:

  • Bernard Avishai: It's Not Too Early for the Next Democratic Ticket: Dude, it's way too fucking early. In fact, the subject should be zipped until way after the 2018 elections, and I wish we could put it off until well into 2020: partly because it'll do nothing but distract the press from the real issues, but mostly because the next candidate should represent the party, not usurp the party to stroke her or his ego (which is what being the designated leader would do).

  • Dean Baker: Drugs Are Cheap: Why Do We Let Governments Make Them Expensive? It's worth remembering that private health insurance was quick to add pharmaceutical coverage to their plans because drug therapies were often cheaper than medical interventions. Medicare was slow to follow suit, and by the time they did drugs weren't so cheap any more. The price rise was partly the effect of more money being available through insurance, and partly the increasing callousness of the profit motive, but to cash in the key has been government-granted patent monopolies, which give companies the right to push patients (and insurers) to their limits -- a "right" they've lately been exploiting so universally it's become a major driver of health care cost. There is an easy fix to this, and a little public investment would more than make up for any reductions companies might make to r&d.

    Baker also wrote a major piece on the track record of his fellow economists: The Wrongest Profession.

  • Thomas Frank: The Revolution Will Not Be Curated: There must be a better word for what he's getting at, but the people he's talking about are those who sort and select things (originally art) to be presented to larger groups of people (originally exhibitions). To call these people filters suggests they're more passive than they in fact are. Another word that comes to mind is experts, but that suggests they know more than most seem to, and that they work by some relatively objective criteria which we should respect -- in fact, many people who call themselves experts are distinguished mostly by their partisan support for special interests. Obviously, much can go wrong with all this curating, but it's impossible to be broadly informed without tapping into intermediaries who pay much more attention to specialists. Virtually all of the links in this post came to my attention through curators I've found worthwhile, and if you're reading this you're doing the same. Indeed, that makes me a curator, as I suppose I am in other domains, such as recorded jazz. Still not sure what Frank's title means, unless it's that in order to break out of today's debilitating conventional wisdom you have to be aware of how all this curating limits your options, and seek out info beyond the commonplace. But as a practical matter, that just means that you need to find better curators (and, I would add, hold them to account).

  • Henry Grabar: Corporate Incentives Cost US $45 Billion in 2015, Don't Really Work: Photo features Boeing, who recently extorted $8.7 billion from Washington state for not (for now) moving jobs elsewhere.

  • Aamna Mohdin: The Dutch far right's election donors are almost exclusively American: So rich Americans are trying to buy another election, something they have a lot of practice doing at home, and as a little reporting would easily reveal, abroad. For more on right-wing Dutch candidate Geert Wilders: Michael Birnbaum: The peroxide-blonde crusader who could soon top Dutch elections. Especially interesting is Wilders' experience of working on an Israeli kibbutz ("a trip he described as transformative in shaping his pro-Israel, anti-Muslim views"). Another American publicly supporting Wilders is Rep. Steve King (R-IA): Iowa congressman lauds far-right Dutch politician, warning over 'demographics'. Curious how chummy the International Fraternal Order of Fascists is at the moment, because one lesson history teaches us is that nationalists ultimately find themselves at war with one another, or falling obediently into the orbit of stronger nationalists (as Quisling, Petain, and others prostrated their nations to Hitler's Germany). Do the Dutch really want to elect Wilders (or the French Le Pen) to be even more under Trump's (or Putin's) thumb? [PS: Also on Wilders' funding: Max Blumenthal: The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate.]

  • Rich Montgomery/Andian Cummings: Arcs of two lives intersect in tragedy at Austins bar in Olathe: Profiles of the Trump-inspired shooter (Adam W. Purinton: "51, had long since seen his career as an air traffic controller come to an end, gaining a reputation as an unhappy drinker as he drifted from one low-level job to another") and victim (Srinivas Kuchibbotla, 32, an engineer who had immigrated from Hyderabad, India; he "had the American dream in his grasp: great job, happy marriage, new house and plans for children"). Of course, Trump's spokespeople were quick to disavow the shooting, but aside from its ending (which they'd prefer to leave ambiguous) the whole Trump campaign was based on exploiting the frustrations of folks like Purinton and rallying their furor against people like Kuchibbotla. And it certainly is the case that American businesses prefer hiring brilliant and optimistic foreign-born professionals to trying to train undereducated and aging malcontents like Purinton. We live in a society where even such paltry welfare efforts as we make are more meant to belittle beneficiaries than to build them up, so it's easy to see how Trump's supporters can think the system favors immigrants over natives. And Democrats, having taken every side of the issue (including for the Clintons a leading roll in "ending welfare as we know it"), have had no coherent message, allowing Trump to exploit this simmering wrath -- and to stir it up, as we see here.

  • Vijay Prashad: The Rehabilitation of George W. Bush, War Criminal

  • Paul Rosenberg: Stronger than Tea: The anti-Trump resistance is much bigger than the Tea Party -- and it has to be.

  • Danielle Ryan: WikiLeaks CIA dump makes the Russian hacking story even murkier -- if that's possible: I haven't followed the latest WikiLeaks dump of confidential CIA documents enough to form an opinion on whether it's a good or bad or mixed thing, and frankly don't much care. Clearly, we already knew that the CIA was out of control, which we should have expected simply due to the cloak of secrecy under which it works. Still, this article makes some interesting points:

    The Vault 7 leaks are not exactly a smoking gun for those who maintain Russia's innocence where the DNC hacks and leaks are concerned -- but they're not insignificant either. If anything, the new leaks should make people think a little harder before putting their complete trust in the CIA's public conclusions about the acts (or alleged acts) of enemy states. . . .

    The fact that the CIA -- an organization of professionals trained in the most sophisticated methods of deception -- is front and center promoting the idea that Assange is a Russian agent, should be enough for anyone to take that idea with a pinch of salt.

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Sunday, March 5, 2017

Weekend Roundup

For a while there, I thought I had shot my wad on Thursday's Midweek Roundup, but it didn't take long for the floodgates to open.

I thought I'd start this with a remarkable letter that appeared in the Wichita Eagle by Gregory H. Bontrager, under the title "Trump on our side" (emphasis added):

The same media that is hounding President Trump are the same ideological malcontents that gave President Obama a free pass for eight lost years of American history. Finally, the middle class has a friend in the White House.

If you like welfare, food stamps or unchecked borders, Obama is the man for you. But if you work for a living or own your own business, Trump is on your side. Despite media hype, the age of the working man has arrived, as personified by Trump.

No more apologies will be accepted from America-hating elitists and the clueless children they foster on college campuses.

The American worker will no longer be held hostage to insane regulations by runaway bureaucracies such as the Environmental Protection Agency or rogue tax collectors in the IRS who have been weaponized by Democrats to suppress political opposition.

The Democratic Party cares more about the rights of illegal aliens than your children being able to walk safely down the streets of their own neighborhoods.

Whether they sit on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals or the city councils of sanctuary cities, it is time to push aside these apostate Americans and take our country back.

As someone who grew up in a union household, I can't help but be moved by this "working man" rhetoric, although I recognize that close to half of wage-earners in America are women, and that most of the jobs people work at today are in the service sector, more or less removed from the muscle and grime associated with the working men of yore -- hardly a vanished species, but much less prevalent than in my father's and grandfather's days. Nor do I begrudge the right of some people "who own their own business" to think of themselves as "working men" -- those, at least, who actually do some of their own work, as opposed to the ones who merely bark orders and push papers, but I know full well that nothing changes a person like controlling a business' checkbook, especially politically.

Still, what I find unfathomable is how anyone who's not a real estate magnate (or maybe a hedge fund manager) can imagine that Donald Trump -- a man who's spent every waking moment in the last fifty years pursuing his own wealth and celebrating his own ego -- would be on their side, or even give half a shit about them. Even the author's laundry list of phobias doesn't justify his leap of faith.

Most wage earners -- a more accurate if less romantic term than "working man" -- understand that welfare and food stamps are part of a safety net that, when properly supported, protects the lowest earners from disaster. Even people who never directly make use of such support benefit from living in a society which doesn't allow abject poverty to fester. Similarly, most government regulation is meant to protect workers and communities from the sort of abuses that inevitably tempt profit-seeking private businesses. It's easy to see why some short-sighted business owners may take umbrage at inspectors and tax collectors, but aside from lost jobs when badly managed businesses fail, workers generally benefit from policies which keep businesses from cutting corners.

It is true that if you think your problems are caused by policies which limit the greed and avarice of private companies, Trump will (sometimes) be "on your side." And if you see "illegal aliens" as some sort of plague, you may take some pleasure in Trump's callous and cruel demonization of America's most downtrodden immigrants and refugees. But neither of those stances makes you a "working man," nor does it guarantee that Trump will be your champion. For starters, the man is a world class liar and demagogue, as should already be clear from his selective memory of his campaign promises.

The stuff about Obama and the Democrats is harder to explain, other than that the author appears to have indeed been held hostage the last eight years, not by federal bureaucrats but by the right-wing fantasy media. Although appeals to the vanishing middle class have been a staple of both parties, few politicians in recent memory have devoted so much of their rhetoric to the cause as has Barack Obama. One might fault Obama for delivering so little to the middle class: under him, despite a modest tax increase on the rich, income inequality has continued to increase, the safety net has continued to fray, and his signature health care program delivered at best a mixed blessing. But the idea that with Trump replacing Obama "the middle class has a friend in the White House" is patently absurd.

To be clear, the "middle class" most of my generation grew up in -- we're talking 1950s here -- was the product of two things: a strong union movement which lifted both blue- and white-collar wage-earners to the level where they could own houses and send their kids to public colleges, and near-confiscatory (up to 90%) income tax rates on the still well-to-do managers and owners. (Paul Krugman called this "the great compression" -- see The Conscience of a Liberal.) Look for anything like this in Trump's platform: there's not even a hint of anything comparable. Rather, what the Republicans -- and this is certainly why Trump chose to become one -- have pushed ever since Reagan (or Calvin Coolidge or William McKinley or the robber barons who took over the GOP in the 1870s) is the notion that we'll all be better off if only we let businesses pursue profits unfettered by any sense of social responsibility. It should be clear by now that only the very rich have benefited from that theory, and only to the extent that they've been able to isolate themselves from the world they've left behind. The "middle class" is not a natural condition in capitalist society: it exists only because policies have forced a more equal distribution of the national wealth. Take those policies away, and, sure, a few people can become much richer, while a great many slip into increasing poverty. And that's not just theory. That's what has actually happened, to the extent that Republicans have been able to seize power since 1980.

So there's nothing in Trump's platform to make him "a friend of the middle class." But it's just as incredible to think he might be a friend of anyone. Friendship is based on empathy, common understanding, and mutual respect. To achieve that usually requires familiarity, engagement, and interaction. But how much opportunity does someone like Trump get to interact with even "middle class" (much less poor) people when he lives in the penthouse on top of Trump Tower, is chauffeured around town, and flies on private planes around the world -- at least to the few spots where he owns luxury resorts full of deferential employees and frequented by guests as rarefied as he himself is? Even leaving aside his personality, charitably described as narcissistic, no one can reasonably expect him to relate to, much less empathize with, the everyday problems of most Americans.

The letter contains more absurdities, both of fact -- Obama, rather notoriously, deported more undocumented immigrants than any previous president -- and of interpretation -- I can't even imagine the "free pass" he thinks Obama was granted, or what "eight lost years of American history" even means. (Although thanks to Bush and Republican obstruction of Obama we've wasted sixteen years. and counting, that could have been used to counter global warming -- something future generations are sure to judge us harshly for.)

The Kansas State Legislature passed a law repealing Gov. Sam Brownback's income tax exemption for business owners, at long last promising to fill a budgetary hole that has plagued Kansas since 2011. Brownback vetoed, the House overrode, but the Senate barely sustained the veto, primarily thanks to Republican Majority Leader Susan Wagle switching her position. Richard Crowson drew the cartoon at right to mark the occasion. Sedgwick County Commissioner Richard Ranzau took exception to the cartoon, noting that depicting Wagle as a "female dog" was tantamount to calling her a, well, you know. Ranzau is probably the most outrageously reactionary politician in Kansas, at least in recent years. Of course, it isn't his fault that his name resonates as some lesser known Nazi extermination camp, one you can't quite put your finger on. Still, one would be less likely to make the connection if he had somewhat more moderate take on politics. See Crowson thanks Ranzau for showcasing cartoon.

Robert Christgau forwarded this tweet by James F Haning II, proclaiming it "perfect":

Donald Trump is a stupid man's idea of a smart man, a poor man's idea of a rich man, a weak man's idea of a strong man.

There certainly is a lot of projection concerning Trump. There is scant evidence to support many of the traits his fans attribute to him (although, even without tax returns, he does a fairly good job of passing for rich, even compared to the bottom of the top percentile). And rich seems to buttress the notions of smart and strong, especially given that they don't stand up all that well on their own. He has a bully aspect, but that's mostly exercised through lawyers; other than that he talks big, but is known to tone it down when faced with likely opposition (as during his campaign stop in Mexico, where he offered none of the slander and fury of his post-visit immigration rant). As for smart, he's clearly not even remotely a smart man's idea of smart. Whether stupid men are that stupid is another question: he clearly has a knack for exploiting some people's insecurities, and for projecting himself as their savior. Part of that comes from a very instinctual, almost bred-in, sense humans have that in crisis they should rally behind the guy who looks strongest -- an instinct that's likely to give you a Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Hitler (most of whom turned out to be disasters). Part is that many Americans have way too much admiration for the rich. And part is the luck of running against people who hardly inspire anyone at all. But much of it is that with Trump we have a man who is extraordinarily self-centered and immodest, so much so he doesn't betray any lack of confidence in his abilities, even though they are manifest to anyone who bothers to look.

Some scattered links this week in the Trumpiverse:

  • George Zornick/Zoë Carpenter: Everything Trump Did in His 6th Week That Really Matters: A regular series that goes beyond chasing tweets. Sub-heads:

    • Halted a probe into airline-price transparency. "Stocks in major airlines increased 2 percent."
    • Absolved senior adviser Kellyanne Conway of wrongdoing. Re her promotion of Ivanka Trump's clothing line, contrary to federal ethics rules. "The White House concluded that Conway acted 'without nefarious motive,' and did not announce any disciplinary actions."
    • Swore in a commerce secretary with serious conflicts of interest. Multi-billionaire Wilbur Ross, who among other things "served as the vice-chair of the Bank of Cyprus, 'one of the key offshore havens for illicit Russian finance.'"
    • His attorney general recused himself from Russia inquiries. Jeff Sessions, who falsely testified to the US Senate during confirmation that he had no contact with Russian officials.
    • Announced a special exemption for the Keystone XL pipeline. He also ordered that all pipelines be made with American steel "to the maximum extent possible," which turns out to be not at all. (See Keystone Pipeline Won't Use US Steel Despite Trump Pledge.)
    • Ordered a review of water regulations. The first step toward undoing clean water rules developed by the EPA under Obama.

  • Julia Edwards Ainsley: Trump administration considering separating women, children at Mexico border

  • Eric Alterman: The Media's Addiction to False Equivalencies Has Left Them Vulnerable to Trump: "Decades of conservative efforts to work the press are paying off handsomely." I've described this as the "Earl Weaver effect": you always argue with the umps, not so much to convince them now as to make them more likely to give you a call later on (thus avoiding another scarifying encounter).

  • Coral Davenport; Trump to Undo Vehicle Rules That Curb Global Warming: "The E.P.A. will also begin legal proceedings to revoke a waiver for California that was allowing the state to enforce tougher tailpipe standards for its drivers." Also by Davenport: Top Trump Advisers Are Split on Paris Agreement on Climate Change. A few, like Rex Tillerson, recognize that withdrawal will have adverse impact on how the US is viewed throughout the world. After all, it's a pretty clear message: to protect our industry profits, we don't care what the impact is to the rest of the world: fry, drown, whatever. Note that even if the US doesn't formally withdraw, Trump's EPA is already working hard to make climate catastrophe irreversible. Also see: Steven Mufson/Jason Samenow/Brady Dennis: White House proposes steep budget cut to leading climate science agency: maybe if we stop studying the problem, we won't notice when it happens, so won't know who to blame.

  • Josh Dawsey: Trump's advisers push him to purge Obama appointees: Well, actually they'd like to purge much of the civil service as well as a few dozen holdovers still trying to do their jobs. ("Candidates for only about three dozen of 550 critical Senate-confirmed positions have even been nominated.") A big part of the problem here is that Trump campaigned by totally misrepresenting what Obama's administration had been doing, treating it as all bad and therefore all in need of radical change. But the election didn't change any laws, and policy changes are subject to many checks and balances. No past administration started with a clean slate, and most saw continuity as a virtue. Trump is different partly because he set up the expectation of radical change, and partly because his people have proven unusually incompetent -- I'd say that's largely due to his party having made obstruction its norm for eight years (after making destruction the norm for two terms under GW Bush). Still, the immediately burning issue is that they're steamed about leaks revealing their incompetence. A better solution would be to try to behave in ways that aren't embarrassing to the public, but that's a level of maturity they haven't grown into yet (if indeed they ever will).

  • Paul Feldman: A deadly pattern: States that went red during 2016 election saw more workplace fatalities: Chart is pretty starkly amazing, with only two states above 3.0 (New Mexico and Nevada) voting Democratic, and only one state below 3.0 (Arizona) voting Republican.

  • Jon Finer/Robert Malley: How Our Strategy Against Terrorism Gave Us Trump: Actually, the US doesn't have a strategy against terrorism any more, and hasn't since it became clear that reconstructing Iraq along Texas lines wasn't going to pay off. What passes for one is no more than whacking all the terrorists we notice, or people in their vicinity -- the sort of knee-jerk spasms dead chickens are noted for. What gave us Trump was the callousness and ignorance of continuing a hopeless and hapless war despite clear proof that of having no clue. In early Bush days the US could present itself as some kind of friend, and occasionally find acceptance and support, but those days are long gone as the frustration of losing has turned Americans into haters of all things Islamic. I think it was predictable from the start that this approach would fail, but the authors are still committed to the mission no matter how badly it fails.

  • Todd C Frankel: How Foxconn's broken pledges in Pennsylvania cast doubt on Trump's jobs plan: One thing I'm struck by is how many of the companies Trump's counting on to "invest in America" are Chinese -- not just that their offers are subject to political ploys but that their bottom line depends on getting lower labor costs in the US than they are already getting in China. This doesn't seem like much of a golden opportunity.

  • Jonathan Freedland: Donald Trump isn't the only villain -- the Republican party shares the blame

  • David Cay Johnston: Trump's Lament That He 'Inherited a Mess' of an Economy? False! Sad! Various measures of the economy were actually up for the last months of Obama's second term, with the median wage "began rising in 2013 after 15 years of being in the doldrums." This momentum, a far cry from the "mess" Trump has already started blaming for his own incompetence, will likely continue to buoy Trump for months or even a couple years to come, until Trump (like Bush before him) blows it all to hell. For more on this, see: Christian Weller: The truth about Obama's economic legacy and Trump's inheritance.

  • Paul Krugman: Goodbye Spin, Hello Raw Dishonesty:

    At this point it's easier to list the Trump officials who haven't been caught lying under oath than those who have. This is not an accident. [ . . . ]

    In part, of course, the pervasiveness of lies reflects the character of the man at the top: No president, or for that matter major U.S. political figure of any kind, has ever lied as freely and frequently as Donald Trump. But this isn't just a Trump story. His ability to get away with it, at least so far, requires the support of many enablers: almost all of his party's elected officials, a large bloc of voters and, all too often, much of the news media. [ . . . ]

    But then you watch something like the way much of the news media responded to Mr. Trump's congressional address, and you feel despair. It was a speech filled with falsehoods and vile policy proposals, but read calmly off the teleprompter -- and suddenly everyone was declaring the liar in chief "presidential."

    The point is that if that's all it takes to exonerate the most dishonest man ever to hold high office in America, we're doomed.

    Krugman also wrote Coal Is a State of Mind: Trump keeps insisting that he'll bring back coal mining jobs, but nothing -- not technology and not economics -- suggests he can, no matter how much political will he puts behind it:

    The answer, I'd guess, is that coal isn't really about coal -- it's a symbol of a social order that is no more; both good things (community) and bad (overt racism). Trump is selling the fantasy that this old order can be restored, with seemingly substantive promises about specific jobs mostly just packaging.

    One thought that follows is that Trump may not be as badly hurt by the failure of his promises as one might expect: he can't deliver coal jobs, but he can deliver punishment to various kinds of others.

  • Laila Lalami: Donald Trump Is Making America White Again: The detail points are worth reading, but file this under really bad titles. For one thing, America has never been white, no matter how marginalized the political system made non-whites. For another, while Trump will make America more hurtful for non-whites, nothing he can do will change the racial, religious, and/or ethnic demography of the nation to any meaningful degree. The most he and his fans can hope for is to slow down what they view as a demographic disaster, and perhaps to jigger the system a bit to politically marginalize what they view as undesirable Americans -- that is, after all, the point of the voter suppression laws that are all the rage in Republican legislatures.

  • Jefferson Morley: Who wins? Donald Trump vs. the Koch Brothers on jobs: I had to read down the article to even find out what Trump was thinking of as his jobs program: turns out it's the BAT (Border Adjustment Tax), which is really just a tariff. The Kochs are organizing against BAT, and they have things Trump doesn't have, like a grass roots organization that has been very successful at getting Republicans elected to Congress. (In many ways Trump sailed to the presidency on their coat tails.) So no, it's pretty much dead in Congress, and there's damn little Trump can do about that.

  • Paul Rosenberg: America's infrastructure disaster -- and why Donald Trump will do nothing to fix it:

    The last time it was issued, back 2013, our infrastructure got an overall grade of D+, with a projected $3.6 trillion investment needed by 2020 -- more than 3 1/2 times the amount that President Donald Trump has promised (mostly from private investors) over a much longer period. Grades ranged from a high of a single B- for solid waste to a low of D- in two categories -- levees and inland waterways. There were more straight Ds than anything else -- for schools, dams, aviation, roads, transit, wastewater, drinking water and hazardous waste. Rail and bridges both rated C+, ports a straight C, public parks and recreation a C- and energy a D+. Even Bart wouldn't be proud of that.

    The key problem is that we let business ideologues (mostly but not exclusively Republicans) convince us that government can't do anything competently (except wage war, which kind of proved their point) so we're better off not wasting our money -- just wait for the private sector to fill the need. This is, of course, exactly not how we got all our infrastructure in the first place (the whole point of Jacob S Hacker/Paul Pierson: American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper).

  • Matthew Rozsa: This week in Donald Trump's conflicts of interest: Favoritism from Vancouver to New York City. Rosza also wrote President Pence's problems: Indiana Democrats say VP was "the worst governor we ever had" -- something to bear in mind before you impeach Trump.

  • Katy Waldman: We All Talk Like Donald Trump Now: Sad! Oh, dear! Even when we satirize him the mental rot is contagious! As if we didn't have enough to worry about already!

  • Matthew Yglesias: Trump is Mad Online at Obama, Schwarzenegger, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court: This day (March 4) in tweets. Personally, I'm just gratified that when Trump refers to "McCarthyism" and "Nixon/Watergate" he's treating them as bad things. Nor do I especially mind him dissing Schwarzenegger, recently departed from Trump's former reality show. For more on the latter (possibly the week's least momentus "news") see: Todd VanDerWerff: Arnold Schwarzenegger is leaving The Celebrity Apprentice. He blames President Trump.

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still to America's broader bout of political insanity:

  • William Astore: In Afghanistan, America's Biggest Foe Is Self-Deception: Actually, that's true in America as well. When future generations look back on America today (assuming they should be so lucky), one big thing they will puzzle over is how so many people could have believed in so much really crazy shit.

  • Tony Blair, Who Brought US the War in Iraq, Lectures on the Evils of Populism: Or more to the point, "he criticizes the left for abandoning centrist politicians," like himself -- where centrism means pretending to have a social conscience while serving the advancement of "clean" businesses like high-tech and finance. ("Tony Blair has worked as an advisor to JP Morgan and Zurich Financial Services, since retiring as prime minister.")

  • James Carden: Why Does the US Continue to Arm Terrorists in Syria? Well, because the US doesn't have a clue what it's doing in Syria, or for that matter all across the Middle East. Because US strategists feel the need to choose sides in a contest where no sides are viable let alone right. Because they can't contemplate of resolving problems but by force of arms. And because they, like the "terrorists" they claim to oppose, see terror as a tactic for advancing political goals.

  • Ian Cummings: FBI undercover stings foil terrorist plots -- but how many are agency-created? I think it's pretty clear that Terry Loewen here in Wichita would never have done anything but for FBI prodding. Several other cases mentioned here are similar. I think the Garden City case where three guys planned an attack on a Somali neighborhood was real, but the FBI has a long history of trying to provoke crimes, and that has probably gotten worse with all the "war on terror" nonsense.

  • Nelson Denis: After a Century of American Citizenship, Puerto Ricans Have Little to Show for It

  • Richard J Evans: A Warning From History: Review of Volker Ullrich's recent biography, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, by the author of The Coming of the Third Reich and two massive sequels. I can see the fascination, but I'm more struck by the dissimilarities between then and now -- one is reminded of Marx's quip about the arrival of Napoleon III: "history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce." Nor do I mean to downplay the real people hurt by Trump's policies and acts. But Germany faced a real crisis in 1928-32, and Hitler presented a plausible (albeit totally wrong-headed) solution until his absolute self-confidence and ruthlessness drove the nation over a cliff. Trump's demons are almost totally imaginary (his 40% unemployment rates, the rampaging crime wave, hordes of demented illegal aliens, more hordes of fanatical Muslims), and despite a modest Defense Department budget bump (that will quickly be sopped up by graft) one doubts that he or his anti-government henchmen will ever be able to turn the state into a truly ominous force. Still, his impulses and tendencies are so bad it helps to be reminded how catastrophically they've failed in the past.

    Still, if you want to go further down this rathole: Anis Shivani: Trump and Mussolini: Eleven key lessons from historical fascism. Some key points:

    1. Fascism rechannels economic anxiety: key thing is that it doesn't relieve it, it just redirects blame.
    2. Liberal institutions have already been fatally weakened: I wouldn't say it's fatal here (yet), but Trump wouldn't have risen without the discrediting of key institutions, like the military in the Middle East and bankers everywhere.
    3. Of course it's a minority affair: The Tea Party and the alt-right are every bit as vanguardist as the Bolsheviks, but are rooted in venerable Americanisms, like Nixon's "dirty tricks" and Lombardi's "winning is the only thing."
    4. Its cultural style makes no sense to elites: which in turn makes it hard to counter; it's easy to prove that Trump isn't smart but you won't impress his fans by doing so -- they've spent every moment of the last eight years loathing Obama, suspecting that his brains are merely the engine of deviousness. (Nor did Meryl Streep dissing football gain any traction.)
    5. No form of resistance works: Have fascists ever been voted out of office, given that one thing they've always been quick to do is to rig the system (much like the Republicans with their voter restriction laws, though often even more brutal). "Nothing ever works until fascism's logic, the logic of empire, stands discredited to the point where no denial and no media coverup is possible anymore." Actually the Axis was only "discredited" by the most brutal military counterattack in history.

  • Daniel Politi: Pentagon Has Been Waging Secret Cyberwar Against North Korea Missiles for Years: Perhaps this has something to do with why North Korea is so paranoid, so erratic, and ultimately so dangerous? We have thus far failed to develop the sort of taboo that inhibits other forms of war, like chemical weapons -- in fact, cyberwar usually doesn't even get recognized as such. In a better world, our recent brush with Russian hacking would lead the US and Russia to work toward mutual controls, including suppressing their own independent hackers. But as long as we all think this sort of thing is OK it continues, sometimes with dire consequences.

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Sunday, February 26, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Another week, so here we go again.

Some scattered links this week in the Trumpiverse:

Also a few links less directly tied to the ephemeral in America's bout of political insanity:

  • Andrew Bacevich: At the Altar of American Greatness: There's a line deep into this piece about how "it's the politics that's gotten smaller," and indeed this piece is a good deal smaller than at first advertised -- see the subtitle: "David Brooks on Making America Great Again." Brooks is normally an easy target, but Bacevich stumbles, declaring "among contemporary journalists, he is our Walter Lippmann, the closest thing we have to an establishment-approved public intellectual." Lippmann retired in 1967, so for me was a famous name that signified little -- even today most of what I know about him I had gleaned from Walter Karp's The Politics of War, which featured him as a prominent hawk behind the so-called Great War, but while he often catered to political power, the main thing he's remembered for was his cynicism about the ignorance and gullibility of the American people. Brooks, on the other hand, is little more than a partisan hack with a bit of cosmopolitan make up to pass muster with New York/Washington elites. Still, it's interesting that Bacevich digs up a Brooks column from 1997 prefiguring Donald Trump (cue Marx's joke about tragedy/farce), titled "A Return to National Greatness" -- a title Brooks reiterated in 2017. Especially precious is the line: "The things Americans do are not for themselves only, but for all mankind." He should pinch himself to recall that he's talking about a country which positively worships the ideal of individuals pursuing their self-interest -- as witnessed by the fact that we just elected as president a guy who has done nothing but for more than fifty years.

    Under the circumstances, it's easy to forget that, back in 2003, he and other members of the Church of America the Redeemer devoutly supported the invasion of Iraq. They welcomed war. They urged it. They did so not because Saddam Hussein was uniquely evil -- although he was evil enough -- but because they saw in such a war the means for the United States to accomplish its salvific mission. Toppling Saddam and transforming Iraq would provide the mechanism for affirming and renewing America's "national greatness."

    Anyone daring to disagree with that proposition they denounced as craven or cowardly. Writing at the time, Brooks disparaged those opposing the war as mere "marchers." They were effete, pretentious, ineffective, and absurd. [ . . . ]

    In refusing to reckon with the results of the war he once so ardently endorsed, Brooks is hardly alone. Members of the Church of America the Redeemer, Democrats and Republicans alike, are demonstrably incapable of rendering an honest accounting of what their missionary efforts have yielded.

    Brooks belongs, or once did, to the Church's neoconservative branch. But liberals such as Bill Clinton, along with his secretary of state Madeleine Albright, were congregants in good standing, as were Barack Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton. So, too, are putative conservatives like Senators John McCain, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, all of them subscribing to the belief in the singularity and indispensability of the United States as the chief engine of history, now and forever. [ . . . ]

    That Donald Trump inhabits a universe of his own devising, constructed of carefully arranged alt-facts, is no doubt the case. Yet, in truth, much the same can be said of David Brooks and others sharing his view of a country providentially charged to serve as the "successor to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome." In fact, this conception of America's purpose expresses not the intent of providence, which is inherently ambiguous, but their own arrogance and conceit. Out of that conceit comes much mischief. And in the wake of mischief come charlatans like Donald Trump.

  • Srecko Horvat: Tom Hardy's Taboo goes to the heart of our new imperialist darkness: Not sure the series is that coherent, but the asides like how "colonialism doesn't cause misery only in poorer countries, it boomerangs back to rich countries with their rising inequality" are spot on. Also he notes how today private companies, much like the "honourable" British East India Company two centuries ago, have become far-from-benign forces all around the world (and he didn't even cite Exxon Mobil as an example).

  • Robin McKie: Biologists say half of all species could be extinct by end of century: Not really a new story: I read a lot about mass extinction back in the 1990s and maybe earlier, when the Alvarez theory of the K-T extinction event became popular and Carl Sagan came up with the notion of "nuclear winter." So, no surprise that it's gotten worse. Still, I'm struck by how the threat has receded in our consciousness as our politicians keep coming up with more urgent short-term crises. Thinking about the end of the century has started to look like a luxury.

  • John Nichols: Tom Perez Narrowly Defeats Keith Ellison for DNC Chair: Margin over Keith Ellison was 35 votes. It's tempting to regard Perez as a corporate stooge, but Esme Cribb has him saying some useful things, like: "I heard from rural America that the Democratic Party hasn't been there for us recently"; "We also have to redefine our mission"; and "Our unity is our greatest strength, and frankly our unity is Donald Trump's greatest nightmare." Underscoring that unity, he named Ellison "deputy chair" (see Trump Claims DNC Chair Race Was 'Totally Rigged,' Offers No Evidence.

POSTSCRIPT:

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Sunday, February 19, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Trump's crazy, disjointed press conference had me thinking: I doubt that Donald Trump has ever read David Ogilvy, but he's done a bang-up job of following Ogilvy's main piece of advice on living one's life:

Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga.

Trump's biography is chock full of such peculiarities, and indeed that's given him a certain protection against anything he does now -- a way of making excuses, rationalizing his tirades and outrages.

Still, I think the most important lesson from last week is the extent to which Trump has chosen to vilify the media. Admittedly, that's a tactic that has served him well in the past, but there is a fundamental difference between attacking the system from outside and defending the system he's gained control of. The media has always been eager to kowtow to power, but that's partly because they expect some stroking in return. Trump's characterization of everything they say as "fake news" is an affront (and a challenge) to their self-image.

On the other hand, Trump's emergence as crazy-in-chief has thus far worked out nicely for the Republican party regulars, both in Congress and increasingly in the administration (and eventually in the courts). As any con artist knows, the key is to get the marks to pay attention elsewhere while they pull off their manipulations unseen, and Trump is a marvelous distraction. Isn't it interesting that Trump's own staunchest campaign supporters have failed to get job offers in the new regime: Rudy Giulliani, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich? Even Kris Kobach, the only Republican in Kansas to endorse Trump before the caucuses here, was passed over despite a couple of high-profile photo ops with Trump. The only exception I can think of is former Senator, new Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trump has managed to keep a couple pet advisers like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway in non-policy positions, but that's about it. He's well on his way to becoming the loneliest and most expendable man in his administration. I can't say as I'm surprised.

Some scattered links this week in the Trumpiverse:

Along the way, I wandered across a lot of liberal links critical of Trump but obsessed with Russia, including posts by John Cassidy, Paul Krugman, George Packer, and David Remnick. In particular, Packer complains about "the heads of key House and Senate committees who are doing as little as possible to expose corruption and possible treason in the White House." The word that sticks in my craw there is "treason." I can't overstate how sick and tired I am of that word -- not least because it implies that we're obligated to be loyal to some hidden, unknowable, and unquestionable power. Packer goes on to describe "an authoritarian and erratic leader" -- I mean, which is it? Doesn't the latter subvert the former? He also names John McCain and Lindsey Graham as among "the few critical Republican voices" -- the only thing they've been critical of is that Trump hasn't started any new wars yet (and the word for that isn't "critical" -- it's "impatient").

Also a few links less directly tied to the ephemeral in America's bout of political insanity:

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Sunday, February 12, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Running the image again. I doubt I'll really keep that up for four years, but for now it inspires me to dig up this shit.

Still need to write up something about Matt Taibbi's Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus -- recently read, although it recycles a lot that I had previously read, including a sizable chunk of Taibbi's 2009 book The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire -- an excavation so profound that Maureen Dowd snarfed up a keyword for her own regurgitation of campaign columns, The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (a title which makes me wonder how she would have faired in Taibbi's 2004 Wimblehack -- see Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches From the Dumb Season).

Still, I suspect that the weakness of both Taibbi and Dowd books is their focus on the more obvious story: how ridiculous the Republicans were (a subject that served Taibbi best in 2008 when he compiled his brief Smells Like Dead Elephants before taking the time to craft The Great Deformation). In retrospect, the real story wasn't how Trump won, but how Hillary Clinton lost. Looking ahead, books by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, out April 18) and/or Doug Wead (Game of Thorns: The Inside Story of Hillary Clinton's Failed Campaign and Donald Trump's Winning Strategy, February 28) promise some insight (or at least insider dope). Still, I doubt anyone is going to write something that satisfactorily explains the whole election for some time.

One thing that keeps eating at me about the election is that while Trump's polls oscillated repeatedly, falling whenever voters got a chance to compare him side-by-side (as in the debates, or even more strongly comparing the two conventions), then bouncing back on the rare weeks when he didn't say something scandalous, Clinton's polls never came close to topping 50%. She was, in short, always vulnerable, and all Trump needed to get close was a couple weeks where he seemed relatively sane (on top of all that Koch money organizing down ballot, especially in Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, and the Midwest). I doubt if any other Republican could have beat Clinton: Trump's ace in the hole was his antithesis to Washington insider-dom, which gave him credibility she couldn't buy (despite massive evidence that he was the crooked one). But just as importantly, Trump suckered her into campaigning on high-minded centrism (including support from nearly everyone in the permanent defense/foreign affairs eatablishment), which weakened her support among traditional Democrats. Any other Republican would have forced her to run as a Democrat, and she would have been better off for that.

Again, it's not that working people rationally thought they'd be better off with Trump. It's just that too many didn't feel any affinity for or solidarity with her. Of course, those who discovered their own reasons for voting against the Republicans -- which includes the left, blacks, Latinos, immigrants, single women, and others the Democrats bank on but don't invest in -- voted for her anyway. But others needed to be reminded of the differences between the parties, and Clinton didn't do a good job at that (nor did Obama give her much to build on, as he almost never blamed Republicans for undermining his efforts).

Meanwhile, Trump's net favorability polling is down to -15.

Some links on the Trump world this week:

Also a few links not so directly tied to America's bout of political insanity:

  • At TomDispatch this week: Tom Engelhardt: Crimes of the Trump Era (a Preview); Raja Menon: Is President Trump Headed for a War with China?. Menon, by the way, has a book called The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (2016). Regarding China, I'm reminded of a scenario sketched out by the late Chalmers Johnson: suppose a country launched a dumptruck-load of gravel into earth orbit (something well within China's capability); it would in short order destroy every satellite (including China's, but most are American or owned by corporations). Without killing any people, the economic effects would be devastating, and it would cripple America's ability to spy on friend and foe, or indeed to direct foreign wars. I'd argue that this capability all by itself makes China too big to attack (Russia, of course, could do the same, at more cost to itself; moreover, the technology isn't far out for emerging rocket builders, notably Iran and North Korea). Given these realities, the US would be well advised to work on cooperation instead of intimidation. Still, that's not Trump's style, nor is it China's: "Xi Jinping, like Trump, presents himself as a tough guy, sure to trounce his enemies at home and abroad. Retaining that image requirse that he not bend when it comes to defending China's land and honor." Neocon Robert Kagan has his own alarming scenario: Backint Into World War III. But then he's arguing to march forward into conflict, rather than back into it -- which, by the way, he sees Trump doing in his "further accommodation of Russia" (as opposed to his "tough" stance against China).

  • Stan Finger: Police seek answers, reversal as aggravated assaults surge: Could a 50% increase in aggravated assault cases since the 2013 passage of Kansas' "open carry" gun law have anything to do with that law? Minds boggle, especially as the delayed opening up of open gun carry on college campuses is looming. One complaint is new gun toters haven't been "properly trained," but wasn't a big part of the 2013 law the elimination of training requirements?

    Also in the Eagle today: Dion Lefler/Stan Finger: Race to replace Pompeo in Congress is down to three candidates: Republicans nominated Brownback crony Ron Estes, while the Democrats are backing civil rights attorney James Thompson, who will hopefully turn the election to replace CIA Director Mike Pompeo into a referendum on the Trump and Brownback administrations. (Salon has a piece by Rosana Hegeman on Thompson.) Also: Dion Lefler: 1,500 Sanders tickets sold so far, leading to move to a bigger venue, who will be speaking in Topeka on February 25.

  • Sayed Kashua: Preparing My Kids for the New America: One thing I've long noted is how much the right-wing, traditionally the last bastion of anti-semitism, has grown to admire Israel. So as they consolidate their power, it shouldn't be surprising that they're starting to make America look more like Israel, or that the first to notice would be Palestinians who lived in (and fled from) Israel.

  • John McQuaid: Coastal cities in danger: Florida has seen bad effects from Trump-like climate gag orders: North Carolina, too. Also, John Upton: Coastal Cities Could Flood Three Times a Week by 2045.

  • Daniel Oppenheimer: Not Yet Falling Apart: "Two thinkers on the left offer a guide to navigating the stormy seas of modernity." Quasi-review of Mark Lilla's The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, trying to contrast it with Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (due for a new edition, with Trump eclipsing Palin, as indeed it does get worse, not to mention dumber). Oppenheimer make much of Lilla reviewing (and panning) Robin's book, then not including the review in his short collection (like Robin, the book stakes out the terrain of a broad, systematic study but falls short by recycling old book reviews -- in this case "thinkers" such as Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, Eric Vogelin, and Michel Houllebecq).

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Sunday, February 5, 2017

Weekend Roundup

Picked up this image off Twitter. Looks like we've found our Weekend Roundup motto, for the next four years anyways. More links than usual because so much shit's been happening. Less commentary than in the old days because it's all so straightforwardly obvious.

I had meant to write about Matt Taibbi's book Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus, but should hold off and do that later. I will say that the big problems with the book are due to the concept: it mostly a compilation of previously published pieces, so tends to preserve the moment's misconceptions in amber rather than taking the time to rethink the story from its conclusion in a way that might make more sense of it all. On the other hand, it didn't make sense, and still doesn't make sense, and as the consequences of the election unfold becomes more and more surreal. In Taibbi's defense, he probably had a better grasp both of Trump's appeal and of Clinton's repulsion than any journalist I can think of. Also does a heroic job of not mincing words, and remains exceptionally conscious of how presidential campaigns warp the media space around them. Still, he can't quite believe how it turned out, and neither can I.

A short bit from a New York Times "By the Book" interview with Viet Tranh Nguyen (wrote a novel, The Sympathizer, which my wife read and loved):

I've been reading news and opinion pieces on Facebook and Twitter. They're utterly terrifying and depressing, since my social circle basically thinks that a Trump presidency spells the end of the world. To get out of the echo chamber, I read Donald Trump's Twitter feed. It's utterly terrifying and depressing, and I run back into the echo chamber.

I take comfort in the children's literature that I read to my 3-year-old son. He will tolerate the tales of Beatrix Potter, which I find soothing, but mostly he wants to hear about Batman, Superman, Ghostbusters and Star Wars. The moral clarity is comforting not just for a 3-year-old, but also for many adults. This is why they are relevant to our divided age, where most people identify with the rebels but so many in fact are complicit with the Empire.

The links below, of course, come from the left-liberal echo chamber (well, plus some anti-war paleo-conservatives). They're the ones paying attention (in some cases a welcome change after sleepwalking through the Obama years).

I picked this up off Twitter, but I also saw the video clip (OK, on Saturday Night Live, but it sure looked authentic. Comes from Bill O'Reilly interviewing Trump:

O'REILLY: But he's a killer though. Putin's a killer.

TRUMP: There are a lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. What do you think -- our country's so innocent?

There are a lot of things one can say about this. For one thing it's true, which isn't often the case with Trump. But it's hardly a revelation. It's just something that no politician would say -- least of all someone like Obama or the Clintons who have personally signed off on execution orders then gone on to gloat about their killings in public. So you can chalk Trump's admission up to his anti-PC ethic: his willingness to call out truths in blunt language. But more specifically, he's denying O'Reilly resort to a PC cliché. He's saying you can't dismiss working with Putin out of hand because he's a killer. We're all killers here -- Trump joined the club last week in ordering a Seal Team 6 assault in Yemen -- so that hardly disqualifies Putin. The disturbing part is that being a killer is probably something Trump admires in Putin. Back during the campaign, Trump not only vowed to kill ostensible enemies like ISIS, he talked on several occasions about shooting random people on Fifth Avenue, like the ability to do that and not be held accountable would be the pinnacle of freedom. Being elected president doesn't quite afford him that latitude, but it does offer plenty of opportunities to indulge his blood lust. Worse still, Trump's championing of killers helps establish murder as a political and social norm. Sure, assassination has been sanctioned as expedient politics by US presidents at least as far back as Kennedy, but Trump threatens to make it a uniquely new bragging point.

As this and similar stories play out, all sorts of nonsense is likely to ensue. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at Adam Gopnik: Trump's Radical Anti-Americanism. The truth is that America has a long history of split-personality disorder, at once touting lofty progressive intentions while having committed a long series of inexcusable atrocities. So will the real America stand up? At least with the exceptionalist cant you knew they'd try to put on a kind and honorable face. But with Trump and his more bloodthirsty followers, you're liable to get something else: a celebration of the underside of American history, a legacy that celebrates brutal and ruthless conquest.

Some scattered links this week:

Also a few links not so directly tied to America's bout of political insanity:

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