Loose* [0 - 9]

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 36 days ago, on September 14.

I rather arbitrarily rushed this out, partly because it had been so long that some of the old stories have started to fade — like Charlie Kirk and Jimmy Kimmel, in the new "Topical Stories" section — while others have taken significant turns. Back when I was doing Speaking of Which I had a routine of cycling through a series of websites and sorting out whatever I found. This isn't normally anywhere close to that systematic, with this time even less than usual. Another reason for doing it now is that I have better things to do this week, and I don't want the draft file hanging over my head. I figure I can add more if need be, and possibly revisit some bits, like I did ten days after my last one, in More Thoughts on Loose Tabs. No guarantee that I'll do that again, but it seems like there's always more to say.

Topical Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following section.

Charlie Kirk: Right-wing activist, hustler, and media personality, shot and killed on September 10, his martyrdom quickly refashioned as an excuse to purge any critical discussion of the right. Wikipedia offers a comprehensive biography as well as a sampling of his views. He ran Turning Point USA, an organizing group reputed to be popular on college campuses and instrumental in getting the vote out for Trump -- one of many ways he was closely aligned with Trump (I'm tempted to say, like Ernst Röhm was aligned with Hitler, but less muscle and more mouth). He had a prominent talk radio program, and wrote several books:

  • Time for a Turning Point: Setting a Course Toward Free Markets and Limited Government for Future Generations, with Brent Hamachek (2016)
  • Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can WIN the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters (2018, forward by Donald Trump Jr)
  • The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future (2020)
  • The College Scam: How America's Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth (2022)
  • Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West (2024)

Some more articles on Kirk:

  • Jeffrey St Clair [09-15] An occurrence in Orem: notes on the murder of Charlie Kirk. Much of this appeared in a Roaming Charges at the time, but here has been restructured for this one subject.

  • Kyle Chayka [09-17]: Charlie Kirk and Tyler Robinson came from the same warped online worlds: "The right-wing activist and his alleged assassin were both creatures of a digital ecosystem that rewards viral engagement at all costs."

  • Eric Levitz [09-20]: The comforting fiction that Charlie Kirk's killer was far-right: "Why some progressives lied to themselves about Tyler Robinson." Not a lot of good examples of "progressives" lying to themselves here (Heather Cox Richardson, Jimmy Kimmel, although few reports are detailed enough to tell). I see little value in trying to tag a label on a shooter, and much risk, of confusion or worse. But in general, shooting your opponents isn't a very left thing to do, while on the right it's both more common and more in tune with their ideology (inequality bolstered by power ultimately based on force) and custom (like their gun fetishism). But it's also likely that the more violent people on the right become, the more tempting their victims will find it to fight back in kind. When they do, that shouldn't suggest that their violence is somehow the consequence of left thinking — where inequality is seen as the key problem, and violence is opposed both on moral and political grounds — as opposed to a stray impulse from the broader American gun culture. I'd go so far as to say that if/when someone who identifies with the left shoots an alleged enemy of the left, that such a person is experiencing a (perhaps temporary) suspension of principles, not acting from them. I can even imagine scenarios where anti-right violence is reasonable — e.g., "self-defense" (which I reject as a right, where as with our "stand your ground" laws can easily be construed as a license to kill, but may accept as a mitigating factor, one rooted less in ideology than in our common human culture).

  • Katherine Kelaidis [09-24]: MAGA's first martyr: "The killing of Charlie Kirk could turn the movement into a faith that outlives Donald Trump. "As MAGA's first martyr, the myth being crafted around Kirk both mirrors that of earlier religions' martyrs while still bearing the unique marks of the MAGA faith."

  • Zack Beauchamp [09-24]: The right wants Charlie Kirk's death to be a "George Floyd" moment. Not that they want anyone to react quite like Kirk himself reacted to George Floyd's murder. Interview with Tanner Greer ("a conservative author and essayist who had written brilliantly about what Kirk meant to the right on his blog the Scholar's Stage"). This starts with a pretty thorough description of why Kirk mattered to the right ("second only to Donald Trump himself"). Beyond the media prowess, the grass roots organizing, and the networking, Greer claims him as a model: "an example of how this conservative national populist thing can be done without authoritarian measures and be very popular."

  • Steven Pinker [09-28]: The right's post-Kirk crackdown has a familiar mob logic.

  • Art Jipson [10-01]: Charlie Kirk and the making of an AI-generated martyr.

  • Alain Stephens [10-14]: The right wing desperately wants to make Charlie Kirk its MLK: "On Kirk's 'National Day of Remembrance,' white supremacists want to replace a tradition of justice with their own manufactured myth."

Jimmie Kimmel: His late-night show was suspended in response to orchestrated outrage over some speculation over Charlie Kirk's shooter, but reinstated (with numerous local stations blacked out) after a week or so. The suspension appears to have been triggered by the affiliates, which are often owned by right-wingers who jumped on this opportunity to exert their political preferences, but they did so in the context of inflammatory rhetoric by Trump's FCC chair. This goes to show that while acquiescence to fascism can be coerced, it's often just eagerly embraced by previously closeted sympathizers.

  • Zack Beauchamp [09-17] Let's be clear about what happened to Jimmy Kimmel: He "was just taken off the airwaves because the Trump administration didn't like what he had to say — and threatened his employer until they shut him up." Trump's agent here is FCC head Brendan Carr, who earned his appointment by writing the FCC section for Project 2025.

    Carr's threat should have been toothless. The FCC is prohibited by law from employing "the power of censorship" or interfering "with the right of free speech." There is a very narrow and rarely used exception for "news distortion," in which a broadcast news outlet knowingly airs false reports. What Kimmel did — an offhand comment based on weak evidence — is extremely different from creating a news report with the intent to deceive.

    But months before the shooting, Carr had begun investigating complaints under this exception against ABC and CBS stations, specifically allegations of anti-conservative bias. Stations had to take Carr's threat seriously — even though Carr himself had declared (in a 2024 tweet) that "the First Amendment prohibits government officials from coercing private parties into suppressing protected speech."

    Hours after Carr's Wednesday threat, Nexstar — the largest owner of local stations in America — suddenly decided that Kimmel's comments from two nights ago were unacceptable. Nexstar, it should be noted, is currently attempting to purchase one of its major rivals for $6.2 billion — a merger that would require express FCC approval.

  • Constance Grady [09-18] How Jimmy Kimmel became Trump's nemesis.

  • Jason Bailey [09-18] Jimmy Kimmel's cancellation is un-American: "Everyone concerned about free speech should be concerned about his show being pulled from the air."

  • Cameron Peters [09-18]: Trump's brazen attack on free speech: "How the Trump administration took Jimmy Kimmel off the air."

  • Jeet Heer [09-18]: Jimmy Kimmel's bosses sold us all out: "The mainstream media is complicit in the biggest attack on free speech since the McCarthy era. Kimmel's suspension is just the latest proof."

  • Adam Serwer [09-18]: The Constitution protects Jimmy Kimmel's mistake.

    What happened to Jimmy Kimmel is not about one comedian who said something he should not have said. The Trump administration and its enforcers want to control your speech, your behavior, even your public expressions of mourning. You are not allowed to criticize the president's associates. You do not even retain the right to remain silent; you must make public expressions of emotions demanded by the administration and its allies or incur its disfavor, which can threaten your livelihood.This is the road to totalitarianism, and it does not end with one man losing his television show.

  • Eric Levitz [09-19]: The right's big lie about Jimmy Kimmel's suspension: "the right believes that liberals are getting a taste of their own medicine."

  • Paul Starr [09-22]: Capture the media, control the culture? "Trump's attack on Jimmy Kimmel helps spotlight an even bigger problem."

  • Christian Paz [09-24]: Jimmy Kimmel's return showed the potential — and limits — of celebrity: "An emotional monologue, a takedown of Trump, and a victory for individual action." But note: "Sinclair and Nexstar are continuing their boycott of his show."

The right-wing war on free speech: The Kimmel suspension was just one headline in a much broader offensive.

  • Benjamin Mullin [09-15] Washington Post columnist says she was fired for posts after Charlie Kirk shooting: "Karen Attiah said she was fired for 'speaking out against political violence' and America's apathy toward guns."

  • Shayan Sardarizadeh/Kayleen Devlin [09-18] What is Antifa and why is President Trump targeting it?.

  • Zack Beauchamp [09-17]: The third Red Scare: "The right's new assault on free speech isn't cancel culture. It's worse."

  • Charlie Savage [09-18]: Can Trump actually designate Antifa a terrorist group? Here are the facts.

  • Jeff Sharlet [09-26]: Rubber glue fascism: "A close reading of "National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence."

  • Louis Menand [09-26]: Where the battle over free speech is leading us: Starts by quoting Trump's Jan. 20 executive ovder on "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship," then this:

    The President and his Administration then proceeded to ban the Associated Press from certain press events because it did not refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, sanction law firms that represented clients whose political views the Administration regards as unfriendly, arrest and seek to deport immigrants legally in the United States for opinions they expressed in speech or in print, defund universities for alleged antisemitic speech and leftist bias, sue the Wall Street Journal for libel, extort sixteen million dollars from the corporate owner of CBS because of the way a "60 Minutes" interview was edited, set about dismantling the Voice of America for being "anti-Trump" and "radical," coerce businesses and private colleges and universities to purge the word "diversity" from their websites, and order the National Endowment for the Arts to reject grant applications for projects that "promote gender ideology."

    After threats from the head of the Federal Communications Commission, a late-night television personality had his show suspended because of some (rather confusing) thing he said about Trump's political movement. Other media outlets were advised to get in line. Trump has proposed that licenses be withdrawn from companies that air content critical of him. The Administration has opened Justice Department investigations into and yanked security details from people whose political views it dislikes. It has also warned that it may revoke the visas of and deport any foreign nationals who joke about the death of Charlie Kirk. West Point cancelled an award ceremony for Tom Hanks, after having already winnowed its library of potentially offensive books.

    This piece goes on to review a couple of books: Christopher L. Eisgruber: Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right; Fara Dabhoiwala: What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. "Eisgruber thinks that the maximalist character of American free-speech law is the best thing about it, but Dabhoiwala thinks it's the worst."

  • Matthew Whitley [09-27]: What liberals get wrong about Trump's executive order on antifa: "Liberals dismiss antifa as just an idea — instead of acting to defend the activists, researchers, and organizers facing persecution."

  • Nicole Hemmer [09-30]: We have seen the 'woke right' before, and it wasn't pretty then, either.

  • Thor Benson [09-16]: Republicans want to protect free speech for themselves and no one else: "The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress continue to attack free speech in numerous ways." Based on an interview with Adam Serwer, who sums up: "Conservatives can say what they want, and everyone else can say what conservatives want. So it basically means that only conservatives have a right to free speech." Or: "I sometimes refer to it as conservatives believing they have a right to monologue. They can speak, and you have to listen and like it. But you can't talk back."

Trump's political prosecutions: He's been collecting his grudge list. Now his DOJ has it, and is moving against his "enemies," including his investigation of John Bolton, and indictments so far against James Comey and Letitia James.

Trump, Hegseth, and the rally at Quantico: They're certainly making it look like they want to use the military to dominate and control their political enemies. The New Republic did a series of articles in 2024 about What American Fascism Would Look Like, and they're worth revisiting now that it takes less imagination to see their relevance. In particular, see Rosa Brooks [2024-05-16]: The liberal fantasy is just that: on the military in fascist America. While she starts dismissive of "liberal fantasy," she does concede this much:

Even without the specter of a president bent on retribution, the vast majority of military personnel will err on the side of obedience if there is even the slightest uncertainty about whether a particular presidential directive is unlawful. And if the senior officers most inclined to object have already been demoted or dismissed, it is implausible that Trump's orders will face widespread military resistance.

No one should kid themselves about the degree of legal latitude President Trump would enjoy. Bush administration lawyers had to turn themselves into pretzels to argue that torture wasn't really torture­. But most of Trump's stated plans won't even require lawyerly contortions. Historically, there's been a strong norm against domestic use of the military to suppress protest or engage in law enforcement activities, and some legal safeguards exist. But under the Insurrection Act, the president can employ the military domestically in response to rebellion or insurrection, or when "any part or class of [a state's] people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution," or when an act of rebellion or violence "opposes or obstructs the execution" of the law.

The Supreme Court has historically interpreted this as giving the president complete discretion to decide what kind of activity justifies domestic use of the military. "The authority to decide whether the exigency has arisen belongs exclusively to the President," opined the court in Martin v. Mott in 1827. If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and deploys military personnel domestically to quell protests or round up immigrants, there will be plenty of unhappy military personnel—but they are unlikely to have any basis on which to claim such deployments are unlawful.

And when it comes to military action outside the United States, the news is worse. Notwithstanding Congress's constitutional powers and legislation such as the War Powers Act, successive presidents have enjoyed a virtually unconstrained ability to use military force beyond our borders. There would be plenty of military unhappiness if Trump directed attacks on Mexican soil or the use of tactical nuclear weapons, but it's unlikely military leaders would have any lawful basis to object.

Military leaders who dislike the orders they receive sometimes engage in the time-honored Pentagon tradition of stonewalling and slow-rolling, looking for ways to quietly thwart the objectives of their civilian masters while maintaining a facade of compliance. But if President Trump uses his power to fire or demote insufficiently loyal general officers, as he says he will, even this dubious avenue of military resistance will likely be closed off.

The purpose of the Quantico gathering of all of the military's general officers was pretty clearly to assess and police their loyalty to the administration, which increasingly matches Trump's political agenda. One big thing on that agenda is staying in power beyond Trump's elected term. Using the military to do that seems desperate and risky, but it is something to think about, if only because it is something Trump's people are definitely thinking about. The following are some articles on the Trump-Hegseth military — rechristened the War Department, because they want you to fear it, and because they see a growing cult of "warrior ethos" as serving their needs:

Shutdown: The federal government was nominally shut down on October 1, with the expiration of the earlier continuing resolution that allowed the government to spend appropriated money pending new authorization. For an overview, see Wikipedia: 2025 United States federal government shutdown. it has continued at least 12 days, making it one of the longest of the increasingly frequent shutdowns. I've paid very little attention to this, but have noted a few articles below. Without careful study, I'm inclined to believe that Democrats are historically so opposed to shutdowns that if they're responsible for this one — and they are blocking cloture on some kind of continuing resolution in the Senate — they must have an awful good reason for doing so. And with Trump politicizing every nook and cranny of government, I'm not sure that shutting things down will be much worse than letting them continue to run amok as they've been doing. But that's not a reason for or against shutdown; it's just a reason not to get overly worked up over the issue.

Bari Weiss: Former "anti-woke" New York Times commentator keeps failing upwards, now to the top editor spot at CBS News.

Epsteinmania: Not dead yet, especially if you're a Democratic pol, but fading fast.

Kamala Harris: She's in the news (barely) with her campaign memoir, 107 Days.

  • Jeet Heer [09-26]: The shortest presidential campaign: "a devastating indictment of Joe Biden. It also documents the limits of her own politics."

  • Eoin Higgins [10-07]: Jonathan Chait thinks Kamala Harris went too far left. He's just falling for Trump's demagoguery. I haven't read Chait since he moved to The Atlantic — not that I wouldn't have taken the opportunity to ridicule recent pieces like Democrats still have no idea what went wrong, but paying for him seems a bit much — but he seems stuck in the idea that the left-right axis is all there is to politics, and that implies that the left party should hew as close as possible to the right party in order to obtain the most votes. But politics doesn't work that way: some issues don't have a left-right divide, and there are other traits to consider, like integrity, competency, fortitude, and leadership skills. But perhaps most foolishly, he assumes that the right's talking points matter to the mugwump voters he reveres as centrists. The problem is centrism isn't merely a shade between left and right. Centrists are conflicted, embracing some things the right says, and some things the left says. The trick isn't to muddy the waters, as Chait would have you do, but to make your points seem more important than theirs. Soft-pedaling rarely if ever works, because they pick up on your doubts and don't believe you.

    By the way, for an idea of what Chait's been writing over there, see this list of titles. His anti-Trump pieces are probably as good as ever.

  • Amy Davidson Sorkin [10-08]: Who can lead the Democrats? "Kamala Harris almost won in 2024. So why does her new book feel like another defeat?" Possibly because henceforth the losing is what people remember, what defines her, and what she'll never escape from. "One of the puzzles of 107 Days is that such details do not, on the whole, come across as humanizing, let alone endearing, but as dreary and even sour." Maybe because she's a loser? And nothing she has to say is substantial enough to overcome that? "Harris was dealt an enormously difficult hand and for the most part she played it well, galvanizing much of her party while enduring an immeasurable level of misogyny and racism. And she almost won." But she didn't. And the "galvanizing" had less to do with her than with a party base that desperately wanted her to be the leader they needed. The party was psyched to move beyond Biden, and readily accepted her as their leader. I can nitpick now, but I didn't have a problem with going with her back then, nor did other Democrats. We trusted her, and even her team, and they let us down. That's not easily forgiven. Still, one thing I wonder here is since she does have some kind of critique of Biden, would it have helped had she been more explicit about it during the election.

  • Ross Barkan [10-11]: The emptiness of Kamala Harris: "The lack of vision in her book tour shows why she lost."

No Kings protests: I've never had much interest in demonstrations. My first was against the Vietnam War, and while I was not just opposed, the war had shaken all my faith in American justice and decency, I only went because my brother insisted. I only went this time because my wife insisted. We wandered around the northwest perimeter, and left early. Lots of people, all sorts, many in costume, most with a wide range of homemade signs. They were lining Douglas, but hadn't blocked traffic. It was very loud, with chants of "this is what democracy looks like," and car horns (presumably in approval, but I saw one Trump pickup with four flags blasting out "YMCA"). Here's some video (caption says "8,000 to 10,000 people"). I'm not making a search for articles, but ran across some anyway:

  • Quinta Jurcic [10-18]: Resistance is cringe: "But it's also effective."

    Idealism helped motivate Trump's opponents during his first term. But it has the potential to carry even more weight during his second, given how the president's anti-democratic project is not as constrained as it was the first time around. As Levin of Indivisible told me, "The real enemy in an authoritarian breakthrough moment is nihilism and cynicism and fatalism." This idea was a regular subject of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who famously argued that totalitarian regimes depend on eroding their subjects' sense of political possibility. Such governments, she wrote, aim not "to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."

    "I didn't like resistlib cringe content in the first Trump administration," wrote Adam Gurri, the editor in chief of Liberal Currents, in a social-media post two months after Trump's second inauguration, admitting: "I was wrong. I was just being a snob." As Gurri suggests, the administration's insistence on irony and insincerity has given a new power to plain, old, corny symbols. Recently, a photo published in the Chicago Tribune went viral, showing a Marine veteran protesting amid clouds of tear gas in front of an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, stoically holding not one but two American flags. Even the name of the No Kings protest is a reclamation of foundational American heritage that might have felt cheesy a year ago, but today carries a new seriousness.

Major Threads

Israel: Worse than ever, but main news story as been "Trump's Peace Plan," which (without much research yet, I can safely say) doesn't show much understanding of "peace" or "plan," and is probably just a deniable, insincere feint by Netanyahu. Still, it's hard to imagine Israel accepting any measure of peace without strongarming by the US, so hopeful people are tempted to read more into this than is warranted. Many articles scattered below. I'll try to sum them up later.

  • Muhannad Ayyash [07-13]: Calling the world to account for the Gaza genocide: Review of Haidar Eid's book, Banging on the Walls of the Tank, which "reveals a disturbing but irrefutable reality: the world has abandoned the Palestinian people to be annihilated as a people in the most calculated and brutal fashion possible."

  • Amos Brison [08-01]: Germany's angel of history is screaming: "As Israel obliterates Gaza with Berlin's backing, German public support is plummeting. Yet the government is crushing dissent and refusing to change course — all in the name of atoning for Germany's own genocidal history." One sign from the demo pic: "NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE."

  • Ben Lorber [08-20]: Israel's iron grip on the American right is slipping away: "Generational shift, isolationism, and nationalist anger are breaking the GOP's pro-Israel consensus. But the left must remain wary of their motives."

  • Alaa Salama [08-29]: Forget symbolic statehood — the world must recognize Israeli apartheid: "To push to recognize a Palestinian state creates the illusion of action, but delays the real remedies: sanctioning and isolating Israel's apartheid regime."

  • Bernie Sanders [09-17]: It is genocide: "Many experts have now concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. I agree." It took him quite a while, but he's pretty clear (and blunt) about it here.

  • Lili Meyer [09-18]: How "antisemitism" became a weapon of the right: "At a time when allegations of antisemitism are rampant and often incoherent, historian Mark Mazower offers a helpfully lucid history of the term." Review of Mazower's book, On Antisemitism: A Word in History.

  • Abdallah Fayyad [09-19]: The growing conseusns that Israel is committing genocide: "A UN commission joined a chorus of experts in calling Israel's actions a genocide. Will the world listen?

  • Joshua Keating [09-23]: Turning point or political theater? The big push for Palestinian statehood, explained.

  • Nick Cleveland-Stout:

    • [09-25]: Israel is paying influencers $7,000 per post: "Netanyahu referred this week to a 'community' pushing out preferred messaging in US media -- and boy are they making a princely sum."

    • [09-29]: Israel wants to train ChatGPT to be more pro-Israel: "In a new $6M contract, US firm 'Clock Tower X' will generate and deploy content across platforms, help game algorithms, plus manage AI 'frameworks" to make them more friendly to the cause." Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale "is at the center of the Israeli government's new deal," so aside from whatever misinformation they produce, there is an element of old-fashioned payola at work.

    • [10-07]: Israel wants to hire Chris Pratt and Steph Curry: "The Jewish state is seeking to target Christian Evangelical churches for support, using celebrities and an anti-Palestinian message in a new $3.2M effort."

  • Lama Khouri [09-26]: The necropolitics of hunger: man-made famine and futurity of the Palestinian nation. This stresses that both the short-term and long-term impacts of Israel's starvation tactic concentrate on children. Even those who survive will bear the scars as long as they live. This is sometimes hidden in jargon, like "the mental architecture of unchilding" and "intergenerational biological inheritance," which may take you a while to unpack, but is no less hideous in abstraction.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [09-27]: Israel wins TikTok: "Larry Ellison and a constellation of billionaires will finally get their way, buying the very app they wanted to kill a year ago for being too 'pro-Palestinian'. Hard to credit this, but note: "TikTok has now become where 30% of Americans get their news." Related here:

  • Jonah Valdez [10-01]: The Trump-Netanyahu peace deal promises indefinite occupation.

  • Joshua Keating:

  • Phyllis Bennis [10-03]: Trump and Netanyahu's 20-point Gaza ultimatum: "The plan for Gaza does not promise to end Israel's genocide — but does promise indefinite occupation."

  • Qassam Muaddi

  • Shaul Magic [10-07]: The Zionist consensus among US Jews has collapsed. Something new is emerging: "Two years after the 7 October massacre and the onset of Israel's slaughter in Gaza, American Jewry has been profoundly transformed." Magid is the author of an interesting book on the relationship between American Judaism and Zionism, The Necessity of Exile.

  • William Hartung [10-07]: $21.7 billion in US military aid has fueled Israel's war on Gaza: "A new report shows how American support has been essential to what many experts are now calling a genocide."

  • Jeffrey Sachs/Sybil Fares [10-08]: A decolonised alternative to Trump's Gaza peace plan: "Only a deoclonised plan centered on Palestinian sovereignty can bring lasting peace to Gaza." They list 20 points, in parallel to the Trump points. The most problematic part of this is the extension of Palestinian sovereignty to include some (or all) of the West Bank, with all of it governed by the PA. Although I can imagine Israel, under pressure, giving up its claims to Gaza, there is no chance of it doing so with the West Bank settlements let alone the (illegally, sure) annexed Jerusalem and Golan Heights. While the situation for Palestinians in the West Bank is grim, the situation in Gaza is far more dire, so much so it has to be addressed separately — which means bracketing the broader and more intractable issues of ethnocracy and apartheid. A second point is that the PA is more accurately seen as an Israeli client than as a representative of the Palestinian people. They have no more right to administer Gaza than Hamas does. While I expect that whoever organizes aid to a post-Israel, post-Hamas Gaza will be in the driver's seat, the goal there should in a fairly short time frame to stand up a new polity, which will certainly still have to negotiate with donors but will practice sovereignty. One big problem is that Israel (and before them the UK, and before them the Ottomans) has never allowed the establishment of democracy in any Palestinian territory. Hence, leadership has either been appointed to quislings, or seized by revolutionaries, with neither serving the people well, giving Israel an excuse to run roughshod over all of them.

  • Trita Parsi [10-09]: Trump Gaza Deal will work: If he keeps pressure on Israel: That assumes that Trump has any independent will in the matter. No evidence of that yet.

  • Gershon Baskin [10-09]: A first short note on some thoughts this morning. I was pointed to this piece with a tweet from Michael Goldfarb, who wrote: "Simply the most important piece written about the deal to end the war in Gaza written by a man with two decades of negotiating experience negotiating with Hamas including the last two years since the war started." Baskin is a New York-born Israeli columnist, who founded the think tank IPCRI. He was an adviser to Rabin during the Oslo years, and was involved in the Gilad Shalit negotiations, and has been involved in later "back channel" negotiations with Hamas (via Qatar). He offers some details here:

    During the period between the Israeli attack in Doha and September 19, I was working on ways to get back to the point where we were negotiating the end of the war, with all of the details. Hamas was in a paralysis mode and did not know what to do or how to get back to talks about ending the war.

    On September 19, in the late evening Witkoff called me and said "we have a plan." We had a long conversation and I supported what the Americans were planning and I made a few suggestions on how to get Hamas on board. I was requested to convince the Hamas leadership that Trump was serious and wants the war to end. Throughout the last months I have been in contact with 8 members of the Hamas leadership outside of Gaza. Three of them engaged with me in discussions. I did not make suggestions regarding the Israeli side because for over a year I believed that if President Trump decides that the war has to end, Trump will force Netanyahu into the agreement. That is exactly what happened.

    So he seems to have some inside connections, but isn't really an insider, especially on the Israeli side. He admits to having very few details, but stresses that this isn't just a ceasefire, but an end to the war. He's very generous to Trump, Witkoff, and Kushner. I'm skeptical — perhaps he is also, and simply realizes that these are very vain people who respond to flattery, something I'm in no position to care about — and in any case I'm less forgiving, but it does appear that Netanyahu's decision to bomb Qatar finally crossed a red line, which at least temporarily moved Trump to what seems to be Witkoff's deal. Netanyahu has always preferred bending to breaking, so he bent, trusting his own skills to win out in the end. (After all, he signed Wye River, but kept it from being implemented.) One more quote here (my bold):

    The new government in Gaza — this has to be a Palestinian government and not a neo-colonial mechanism which the Palestinians do not control. The names of independent Gazans with a public profile have been given to the Americans and also to other international and Arab players involved with the day after and the reconstruction of Gaza. The names that Samer Sinijlawi and I submitted to these important players were Gazan civil society leaders that we met with several times on zoom. They drafted a letter and signed it to President Trump that I delivered to Witkoff for the President stating that they were willing to play a role in the governance of Gaza. We don't know how this new government will be formed and when it will take over. Hamas agreed from the outset to this kind of government, even from last year. We don't know if Mahmoud Abbas will ask Dr. Nasser Elkidwa to play a role in the governance of Gaza — something that he has said that he is ready to do.

    I would go much farther in separating Gaza from Israel, including from the Palestinian Authority, which is of necessity an instrument of occupation. I also worry about the thinking on future governance and development by everyone involved, which is another reason to stress the importance of self-determination in Gaza. On the other hand, the people need help, and humoring the rich is inevitably baked into that deal.

  • Refaat Ibrahim [10-10]: When the bombs in Gaza stop, the true pain starts: "The ceasefire brought a silence taht revealed Gaza's deepest wounds — the grief, loss and exhaustion that war had only buried."

  • Ramzy Baroud [10-13]: The defeat of Israel and the rebirth of Palestinian agency: It's hard to argue that either of those things happened, but there is still life in Gaza after two years of genocide, and the current "mere pause" (Baroud's term) offers a moment to reflect on the many failures of Israel's vilest schemes and the West's indulgence of Israeli atrocities. Baroud's prediction that "there will certainly be a subsequent round of conflict" depends primarily on whether Israel can be permanently separated from Gaza, which is not yet envisioned in the Trump plan. Then, of course, there is the West Bank, which is still up for grabs, and will be until Israel learns from its failures, including the damage to its reputation, and sets out on another course.

  • Juan Cole [10-14]: Terror from the skies of the Middle East: a hug airbase with a small country attached to it. Cole, by the way, as a new book: Gaza Yet Stands.

  • Jonah Valdez [10-15]: Israel's mounting ceasefire violations in Gaza: Israel has repeatedly violated ceasefires in the past, and one has good reason to be wary, but I'm not seeing a lot of detail here, beyond the aid restriction from 600 to 300 trucks per day.

  • Connor Echols [10-16]: Gaza ceasefire hanging by a thread: "Repeated violations of Monday's agreement could provoke a return to war." The both-sides-ism here, as everywhere regarding Gaza, is remarkably asymmetrical: Hamas is accused of dragging its feat on repatriating the bodies of dead hostages, some or many of which are likely buried under the rubble of Israeli bombing; Israel, on the other hand, is killing people, and hindering the delivery of aid. The reports about Hamas executing Israel-supported gang members are troubling, but could well be fake (easy to understand why Hamas might execute Israeli agents, harder to see why they would take and publish videos) — in any case, if Israel cared, they should prioritize the release of gang members over hostage corpses. And by the way, note that Israel's decimation of Hamas's civilian administration, as well as their support for gangs to sow chaos, is making the transition to peace all the more treacherous. And that too was undoubtedly part of the plan.

  • Tom Hull:

    • [10-17]: Gaza War Peace Plan: "Twenty Trump points, for better or worse." The first of two pieces I've written on plans to end the war. This one takes Trump's 20 points one-by-one, noting the hidden assumptions and various possible meanings. I promise a second piece, more on what I think should be done.

    • [10-21]: Making peace in Gaza and beyond: A second piece, fairly long, tries to put the Gaza War Peace Plan back into its broader context, so peace can work for everyone. Along the way, I sketch out several ideas for developing international law to provide a framework that puts people about nation states and their power interests.

  • Win McCormack [10-19]: The crime is nationcide: "This is the precise offense of which Israel is guilty." I find this less useful than Baruch Kimmerling's term "politicide" (the title of his 2003 book, subtitled "Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians, which I recall as the first book to really get to the core of Sharon's agenda). Sharon's goal was to destroy the Palestinian Authority, leaving Palestinians with no political options or hopes: with none, all they could do was fight, and Sharon was confident in his ability to kill any who do. This is where the "utterly defeated people" phrase came from. But nationcide makes two mistakes: it assumes that there is a nation to kill, and it suggests that the genocide is incidental to some other aim. There never has been a Palestinian nation to kill. The idea of one was a reaction to Israeli nationalism, and Israeli has struggled mightily (and successfully) to prevent one from forming, but there is a Palestinian people. While Sharon was content merely to reduce them to powerlessness, the current mob has gone much further. I'm not sure "genocide" is the best word for what they're doing, but it is a word that that has legal weight, and if it is to mean anything it has to be applied here.

Russia/Ukraine:

  • Connor Echols:

  • Anatol Lieven [09-30]: 'The West demanded that we get involved in a war with Russia': "In an interview, Georgian President Mikheil Kavelashvili talks about how external interference has poisoned his country's chances for EU ascension."

  • Carl Bildt [10-19]: Putin is out of options: "Whether Russian leaders realize it or not, they have no path to victory." That's been true for a long time. But Ukraine also has no path to victory, and it's long proven futile for either or any side to think in those terms. Perhaps Putin's hope was that Trump would throw Zelensky under the bus, but he missed his chance to dicker in Alaska, and when Europe regrouped behind Zelensky Trump had to pick sides. So the war slogs on, under the dead weight of leaders who were selected not for insight and reason but because they projected as tough and tenacious, cunning and/or stupid.

Trump Regime: Practically every day I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump Administration -- which in its bare embrace of executive authority we might start referring to as the Regime. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything. Pieces on the administration.

Donald Trump (Himself): As for Il Duce, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal peccadillos -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with true madness, it can still be difficult sorting serious incidents from more fanciful ones.

  • John Whitlow [09-18]: The real estate roots of Trumpism and the coming clash with democratic socialism: "Trump's brand of authoritarianism emerges out of New York's real estate industry. As mayor, Zohran Mamdani vows to curb that sector's outsized power."

  • Michael M Grynbaum [09-19] Judge dismisses Trump's lawsuit against the New York Times: "The judge said that the complaint failed to contain a 'short and plain statement of the claim.' Trump has 28 days to refile." Trump was asking for $15 billion in damages, because four New York Times reporters were "disparaging Mr. Trump's reputation as a successful businessman."

  • Cameron Peters [09-23]: Trump's weird day at the UN, briefly explained.

  • Abdallah Fayyad [09-25]: Why voters keep shrugging off Trump's corruption.

  • Eric Levitz [09-26]: The big contradiction in progressive thinking about Trump: "The Democratic debate over whether 'moderation' works is very confused."

  • Brian Karem [10-03]: I've covered Trump for years -- and I've never seen him this scared.

  • Margaret Hartmann [10-10]: Will Trump win a Nobel Peace Prize? All about his desperate bid. Lots of grotty details, but all? The main thing that's missing is the calculation behind the bid. Trump surely knows that he has no real interest in the prize, what it stands for and/or the legacy behind it. And given that he focuses much more on being seen as a warrior (or maybe just a thug), wouldn't he be a bit embarrassed if he actually won? Even Obama was embarrassed when he won. I'll never forget Ariel Sharon's face when GW Bush introduced him as "a man of peace." Sharon's autobiography was Warrior, and he wasn't exactly reknown for his wit. But most importantly, Trump surely understands that the absurdity of his bid guarantees that it will be huge publicity either way. And his supporters will add his loss to the long list of slights and insults he has endured as their champion.

  • Alex Shephard [10-10]: Why Trump will never win a Nobel Peace Prize: "He's embarrassingly desperate for the honor, but his presidency is becoming ever more dictatorial and bloodthirsty."

  • Michael Tomasky [10-10]: Memo to future historians: This is fascism, and millions of us see it: "From Chicago to Portland, James Comey to Letitia James, and so much else — this is no longer America.

  • Nia Prater [10-12]: Trumpworld goes to war over Nobel Peace Prize loss: "The White House and Trump allies are attacking the Nobel Committee, which gave Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado this year's prize."

  • CK Smith [10-13]: Trump saves Columbus Day from "left-wing arsonists": No more Indigenous Peoples' Day.

  • Kim Phillips-Fein [10-14]: A family business: "Trump's theory of politics." A review of Melinda Cooper's book, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance.

  • George Packer [10-17]: The depth of MAGA's moral collapse: "How we got to 'I love Hitler.'" Paywalled, of course, but looks to be a major review of the recent prevalence of Nazi paraphernalia among young MAGA Republicans -- I've already skipped over dozens of such stories, figuring that there is little reason to nitpick among the excrescences of people we already know to be vile and/or stupid. But if you need to be reminded that "Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic — it's antihuman," Packer is here for you. My only question was whether to give this its own slot in the miscellaneous articles, or to dedicate a whole section to recent right-wing ideologizing. But then I realized I already had a section on that explains his subtitle. While one could just as plausibly argue that Trump is merely the vessel of Fox's fermented rot, is unique contribution was in freeing the right from any second-thoughts of shame. In such a universe, the new normal is to seek out the most extreme expressions, which brings them back to Hitler.

  • Simon Jenkins [10-20]: In Gaza, and now Ukraine, Donald Trump may be peace activists' greatest ally. That deserves our backing: "It's a fool's game trying to understand the president's true motives, but do our misgivings matter if the outcome is a speedy end to war?" Yes, it does matter. Peace terms matter, and their variances reflect the intents and goals of those who negotiate or dictate them. Never trust the fascist, even if it seems like the trains are finally running on time. They won't be for long, because the inequity and arrogance, the belief above all in the efficacy of force, is fundamental for them, and will always come back to bite you. Other key point here is don't assume that what Trump is pushing for is really peace. Real peace requires that people on all sides feel safe and secure. That's not Trump's thing. I'd also worry about giving Trump any praise, even ironical, that can be taken out of context (as you know he will do). I don't have a problem acknowledging real accomplishments, but we should keep in mind that the wars Trump supposedly is ending were ones that he helped start in the first place, and has helped sustain as long as he's been president.

Democrats:

Republicans: A late addition, back by popular demand, because it isn't just Trump, we also have to deal with the moral swamp he crawled out of:

Miscellaneous Pieces

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

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [07-25]: Un-hinged: Trump at the UN. Mostly excerpts from the speech, as they practically write their own critiques. For instance, when Trump says, "Under my leadership, energy costs are down, gasoline prices are down, grocery prices are down, mortgage rates are down, and inflation has been defeated," all St Clair needs to add is: "Energy costs are up, gas prices are up, grocery prices are up, inflation is rising."

  • [09-26]: Roaming Charges: What's the frequency, Donald?

  • [10-03]: Roaming Charges: He loves a (buff) man in uniform: Quotes from Trump's nonsense at Quantico, then moves on to recent ICE tactics, then to Israel. He quotes an Israeli rabbi praying for all the children in Gaza to starve, and another "frequent commentator on NewsMax" as saying he wants Greta Thunberg terrified, "rocking in a corner, covering her eyes, pissing." Then there's this Mike Huckabee quote:

    I've been married 51 years . . . There comes a point where there's just no point in even thinking about getting a divorce. The reason Israel and the US will never get a divorce is because neither country can afford to pay the alimony . . . We're hooked up for life.

    It's hard to tell what he understands less of: international relations, America, Israel, or marriage. But he must be thinking of divorce if he's rationalizing so hard against it.

  • [10-10]: Roaming Charges: United States of Emergency. Opens with (examples follow):

    The fatal flaw in Donald Trump's scheme to whitewash American history of its most depraved and embarrassing episodes is that his administration is committing new acts of barbarity and stupidity in real-time on an almost hourly basis. Consider the last week in Chicago and Portland.

    Much more, including:

    • The Energy Department has added "emissions" and "climate change" to its banned words list. Too bad George Carlin isn't around to expound upon the 1,723 words you can't say in the Trump Administration . . .

Marcy Newman [08-17]: Sarah Schulman tackles the urgency, and pitfalls, of solidarity: A review of her book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity.

Zack Beauchamp

  • [08-20]: How conservatives help their young thinkers — and why liberals don't: This is a basic asymmetry: the right wants hierarchy and inequality, and those who profit can afford to hire propagandists; the left, lacking such incentives, depends on good will/altruism, which can be tough to muster when everyone has to scratch out a living. That may have been good enough for a long time, but the big right-wing media push since the 1970s has flooded the zone with crap — a surprising amount of which was taken seriously during the New Democrat vogue. We don't need our own counter-crap, but we do need a way for scholars and reporters to do honest work about the real world, and to make a living doing so.

  • [09-03]: The right debates just how weird their authoritarianism should be: "A roundtable discussion among leading MAGA intellectuals suggests they might be suffering from success." Not an interview, but a review of a 2-hour video roundtable featuring Curtis Yarvin, Patrick Deneen, Chris Rufo, and Christopher Caldwell. "The overall direction, it is clear, is giving more and more power over our lives to Donald J. Trump." For background, refer back to:

  • [2024-09-25]: The 6 thinkers who would define a second Trump term: Caldwell, Deneen, and Yarvin again, plus James Burnham, Harvey Mansfield, Elbridge Colby.

  • [09-19]: This is how Trump ends democracy: "The past week has revealed Trump's road map to one-party rule." Having just read his chapter on Orban's Hungary in his The Reactionary Spirit book, much of this seems pretty familiar.

Katha Pollitt [09-09] We're living in an age of scams: "The anonymity of the Internet makes us all vulnerable to being swindled — and it's making us trust each other less." This is very true, and very important, aside from the obvious point that the age of scams didn't start with the Internet: scams have plagued us at least since the snake oil salesmen of the medicine shows, accelerating with every media advance. They grew out of the invention of money as a representative of value, and the spirit of capitalism, which considered all profits morally equal. This article hardly scratches the surface, not even mentioning AI, which is already a major source of fabricated scam props. I'm surprised that nobody has taken this up as a political issue, given that nearly everyone would support measures to cut down on fraud, spam, and non-solicited advertising. (I wouldn't have a problem with people producing ads and putting them on a public website where people could request them.)

Henry Giroux [09-26]: The road to the camps: echoes of a fascist past.

Julian Lucas [09-29]: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Now he wants to save it." "Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again." Not real clear to me how he intends to do that, but I suppose more of it is laid out in his new memoir, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web.

[PS: I was struck by this book title by one of Berners-Lee's blurbists: The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It. This also led me to Tim Wu: The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, and (only slightly blunter) Cory Doctorow: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse, and What to Do About It.]

Umair Irfan [09-29] America's flood insurance system is doomed to fail: "Between Congress, property development, and climate change, there's no easy fix."

Peter Balonon-Rosen/Jolie Myers/Sean Rameswaram [09-30]: How Rupert Murdoch took over the world.

Peter Turchin [10-02]: Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out. "An analysis of historical crises over the past 2,000 years offers lessons for avoiding the end times." I read Turchin's 2023 book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which is based on a database of crisis periods that increasingly looks like a misguided AI training set. Here he reduces the wisdom of ages to something he calls "the wealth pump," where:

  1. It causes growing popular discontent.
  2. The wealth pump creates too many wealthy elites — more than there are high-power positions.
  3. The wealth pump creates too many youths pursuing not just college but even more advanced degrees in hopes of escaping looming "precarity."

Thus he sees frustrated, desperate "wannabe elites" driving nations to ruin. He suggests some remedies here that I don't disagree with: regulation encouraging production over rent extraction; progressive taxation; worker empowerment (including unions); reducing concentrations of political power. Still, when I read his title, my gut reaction is emphasize new aspects of the present instead of recurring patterns of inequality — and not because I discount the problems posed by significant inequality. It's just that the quantity and quality of changes from 250, 100, even 50 years ago are so overwhelming.

Whitney Curry Wimbish/Naomi Bethune [10-02]: Microsoft is abandoning Windows 10. Hackers are celebrating. "The company will stop supporting the OS on October 14. Advocacy groups warn this will leave up to 400 million computers vulnerable to hacks or in the dump." Ok, here's an idea to mull over: any time a company effectively ceases to support a copyrighted software product, that product must be surrendered to the public, as open source software, so that the public can pick up the slack. Stuff that's officially mothballed obviously should qualify. There also needs to be a mechanism for to appeal cases of inadequate support, so companies that aren't serious about support can't simply lock up their old products by pretending to go through the motions. Selling off the technology to a sham company might be another way to work around this, and another loophole that could be tightened up. There are probably more angles to consider, but the general point is that we should do what we can to make forced obsolescence unviable as a business strategy.

Jared Bernstein [10-03]: Measuring the vibecession: "Why top-line federal statistics miss the economic pain average Americans feel."

Tom Hull [10-04]: Cooking Chinese: My own piece, but surely worth a mention here. Some pictures and links to recipes. Not much technique, but all you really need are some knife skills, a glossary of ingredients, and a willingness to turn the heat up and work fast. Some philosophizing on the theme that a possible path to world peace is learning that all food, no matter how exotic it seems, lands on the same universal taste buds. I also wrote a postscript here:

Dan Grazier [10-07]: US gov't admits F-35 is a failure: "With some wonky, hard to decipher language, a recent GAO report concluded the beleaguered jet will never meet expectations." It was conceived in the 1990s in Lockheed's famous "skunk works" as a state-of-the-art stealth fighter-bomber. The contract was awarded in 2001, but the first plane didn't fly until 2006. It's been a fiasco, but has made Lockheed a lot of money. Lately, you mostly hear about it when some sucker ally agrees to buy some, less because they need or even want it than to please America's arms exporters.

Ruth Marcus [10-09]: Nixon now looks restrained: Author focuses on cases where a president weighs in on a pending criminal case, as Nixon did with Charlie Manson, and Trump with James Comey, but the point can be applied almost everywhere. "But the thirty-seventh President looks like a model of restraint when compared with the forty-seventh, and his supposedly incendiary commentary anodyne by contrast to what emanates daily from the current occupant of the White House. What was once aberrant — indeed, unimaginable — is now standard Trumpfare, demeaning not only the Presidency but to the rule of law." Still, one shouldn't hold Nixon up as a "model of restraint," or as any sort of moderate or liberal, as he consistently did things that in their context were every bit as extremely reactionary as Trump is today. Indeed, Trump's argument that nothing he does as president can be illegal has a singular precedent: Richard Nixon. The slippery slope that Nixon started us on leads directly to Trump.

Bruce E Levine [10-10]: Celebrating Lenny Bruce's 100th birthday: "The world is sick and I'm the doctor".

Democracy Now! [10-10]: 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for anti-Maduro leader María Corina Machado "opposite of peace": interview with Greg Grandin, who pointed out (per Jeet Heer, link below):

Machado's brand of democracy promotion, reliant as it is on US military intervention, deserves skepticism. Speaking on Democracy Now! on Friday, Yale historian Greg Grandin described her winning of the Nobel as a "really a shocking choice." Grandin noted that Machado supported a coup against democratically elected President Hugo Chávez in 2002. Her hard-line position on economic matters has both hampered and divided the anti-Maduro coalition. And the fact that she's praised both the bombing of Venezuelan boats and welcomed further American interventions into Venezuela is likely to strengthen Maduro's hold on power, since it vindicates his claim that the opposition is filled with US puppets. Grandin also pointed out that if the Nobel committee had wanted to legitimize the anti-Maduro opposition, they could've given the award to feminist leaders who are both critics of the regime and oppose US intervention.

    Jeet Heer [10-13]: The Nobel Peace Prize just surrendered to Trump: "Trump is mad that he didn't win. But by honoring Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Committee has endorsed his war against Venezuela — and continued Europe's MAGA groveling." Heer concludes:

    Trump is foolish to think he needs to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He has all the power and glory he could want, because the people who could theoretically stop him have decided to surrender.

  • Greg Grandin:

    • [09-09]: The rift in Trump world over Venezuela: "The Trump administration wants to exert more control over Latin America. Will it come by deal-making or by force?"

      The latter question isn't even rhetorical. To Trump, a "deal" is an occasion when someone else surrenders to his ultimatum. Such deals tend to be as resented as force, just less dramatically opposed. But also note that Trump's maneuvers against Latin America are easy to pin on Marco Rubio, who often seems even more excited to restore reaction there than he is here, and will be no less so when they blow up. Ominous section here on "importing the logic of Gaza."

    • [10-14]: Trump's Caribbean killing spree: "The president's unprecedented and lawless attacks supposedly target drug cartels, but serve a far more troubling political agenda."

  • Gabriel Hetland [10-14]: How María Corina Machado's Nobel Peace Prize could lead to war: "Machado's record makes a mockery of the idea she is a committed champion of peace, promoter of democracy, or unifying figure."

Some notable deaths: Mostly from the New York Times listings. Last time I did such a trawl was on July 20, so we'll look that far back (although some names have appeared since):

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas, but maybe I should just use it to bookmark some of our leading horribles.

  • Jamelle [09-30]: Links to After volatile summer, Trump's approval remains low but stable, poll finds, and adds:

    Perhaps instead of cowering under a blanket labeled "health care," Democrats should respond and advance on the issues that move people. This, of course, would require a foundation of conviction and principle, which may be asking too much of the party's leadership and strategists.

    Note that the image cut off before showing the most damning poll results, that Trump is -20 on "the war between Russia and Ukraine," and -19 on "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict": two issues that Biden blew even worse.

  • Josephine Riesman [10-05]:

    It is morally wrong to want a computer to be sentient. If you owned a sentient thing, you would be a slaver. If you want sentient computers to exist, you just want to create a new kind of slavery. The ethics are as simple as that. Sorry if this offends.

    • Apologies in advance for including an Amazon book link, but I doubt any review can really do this one justice. The book is: John Kennedy: How to Test Negative for Stupid — And Why Washington Never Will. Senator Kennedy ("the one from Louisiana") is being billed as "one of the most distinctive and funny politicians," lauded for "his perceptive (and hilarious) takes on the ridiculousness of political life in this scathingly witty takedown of Washington and its elite denizens." I've seen him dozens of times, and can't say I've ever noticed his wit, but he does offer a pretty good impersonation of the dumbest person in all of America, as well as one of the most repugnant politically. On the other hand, his most quotable quotes turn out to be more humorous than I expected:

    • "Always be yourself . . . unless you suck."
    • "I say this gently: This is why the aliens won't talk to us."
    • "If you trust government, you obviously failed history class."
    • "I believe that our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots."
    • "Always follow your heart . . . but take your brain with you."
    • "I'm not going to Bubble Wrap it: The water in Washington, D.C., won't clear up until you get the pigs out of the creek."
    • "I have the right to remain silent but not the ability."
    • "Common sense is illegal in Washington, D.C., I know. I've seen it firsthand."
    • "I believe that we are going to have to get some new conspiracy theories. All the old ones turned out to be true."

    Granted, on balance we're not talking Groucho Marx level here, or even Yogi Berra. But he's possibly funnier than Bob Dole, who was much wittier than anyone so evil had any right to be.

  • Comfortably Numb [08-18]: Features a New York Times headline from Sept. 18, 1931 [most likely fake]: "HITLER CONDEMNS RIOTS.; He Says They Were Provoked by Paid Agents in Germany." This appeared in my feed just below a picture of mink-clad protesters with signs for "Rai$e the Rent," "Frack Brooklyn," and "Billionaires Against Mamdani." And just above a Fox News headline: "Billionaire's cash flows to anti-Israel activists in nationwide 'No Kings' rallies." More signs noted on placcards:

    • First they came for the immigrants and I spoke up because I know the rest of the God damn poem"
    • No crown for the clown
    • Trump gave my nut to Argentina [chipmunk costume]
    • I caught the woke mind virus and all I got was empathy and critical thinking skills

    Other comments:

    • Imagine what a shitty president you have to be to have nearly 7 million Americans use their day off to protest you.

    Miscellaneous memes:

    • Republicans have $200 million for a ballroom, $1 billion for a new jet and $72 million for endless golf trips. They have money to give ICE $50,000 bonuses. They have $1 million per day to occupy American cities. They have $3.8 billion to send Israel weapons and $40 billion to bailout Argentina. But there's no money for healthcare.

Current count: 254 links, 13906 words (18425 total)

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Sunday, September 14, 2025

Loose Tabs

I moved an already long draft file into the blog queue on Friday, after posting my Notes on Everyday Life piece, More Thoughts on Bernie Sanders and Capitalism. In doing so, I set an implicit deadline for posting this before Monday, when I normally expect to post a Music Week. I could spend an infinite amount of time wrapping this up, trying to make sense of it all, so the budget was hopeful self-discipline. But at 3AM Sunday night/Monday morning, I'm sick and tired of working on this, with no good answer, so I'm opting for the short one, which is to post what I have. If I look at it Monday, I may add a few more similar things, edits some of what I have, write extra notes, or maybe just shrug and move on. There is certainly no shortage of material here. Whether it does any good is another question I can't begin to contemplate, much less answer.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 28 days ago, on August 17.

I'm trying a new experiment here with select bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

Index to sections:

The first section here are major categories, where I didn't wait for a keynote article. These are not necessarily regular features.

Epsteinmania: I'm ready to retire this one, but Trump keeps squirming, so his most opportunistic opponents still hope to reel him in. Since last time: the appearance of Ghislaine Maxwell as Trump's character witness ("a perfect gentleman"); the leak of Trump's contribution to Epstein's "birthday book."

Israel: This is just a small sampling on what remains the single gravest issue in American politics -- even though, by looking at both parties in Congress, it barely seems to register. That's not just because the slaughter and devastation has grown to immense proportions, not because Israel has discredited itself to most people around the world, nor because in providing so much economic and military support the US is now widely viewed as complicit and discredited. It's because Israel is the example Trump is following to secure his own domination domestically. (I explain some of this in my latest Notes on Everyday Life post, but if you know what to look for, you can spot numerous examples throughout this and other Loose Tabs posts. Israel has become a veritable laboratory for fascism. America is not only following their model, but has been bankrolling them for decades. The neocon right understood this at least as far back as their 1996 paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The religious right got an even earlier jump with their apocalypse mongering. Democrats, on the other hand, have cut their own throats by pledging eternal loyalty to a regime that is completely inimical to their own stated beliefs and values. It's no wonder why so many Americans find them undeserving of trust.)

Russia/Ukraine: Last time I posted was just after the Alaska summit, but before Zelensky and his European allies descended on Washington to derail whatever impression Putin had made and return Trump to his usual path of fickle incompetence. As I've since noted, "all sides seem to have lost sight of the ball and are just kicking air." What I mean is that we need to focus more on the people involved than on the land that both sides feel so entitled to. The war started in 2014 when three divisions of Ukraine rejected election results and attempted to split from Ukraine. Russia aided their division, especially in Crimea, but it still seems likely that most of the people there supported realignment with Russia then, and still do now. They should be given the right to decide on their own, free of military coercion, where they want to belong. Of course, the war, both before and after the 2022 invasion, has brought changes, mostly in turning large numbers of people into refugees, but it probably means that the people on both sides of the front line are on the side they want to be. If so, neither side should fear a referendum, as it would very likely legitimize lines that are basically stalemated. One should also be talking about refugees, their rights to return and/or compensation, minority rights in the postwar settlements, and the options of people who find themselves stranded to move wherever they want. Unfortunately, leaders like Putin and Trump have little concern for people. They're much more into symbolic bragging rights. But both sides have done nothing but lose since war broke out. They both need to stop. Refocusing on people is one way out.

Trump regime exploits: Practically every day I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump Administration -- which in its bare embrace of executive authority we might start referring to as the Regime. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything. Pieces on the administration.

Donald Trump (himself): As for the Duce, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal quirks -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with true madness, it can still be difficult sorting serious threats from fanciful ones.

  • Zachary Small:

  • Margaret Hartmann: Basically a gossip columnist who's made "tremendous content" out of Trump's follies. (She also covers the British royals, Michelle Obama, and some Epstein matters I filed [or ignored] elsewhere.) After the newer pieces, some older ones for your amusement.

  • Ed Kilgore [08-24] Trump sees whitewashed US past and dystopian present: Well, as Mort Sahl once said about Charlton Heston, if he were more preceptive, he'd be a happy man. But Trump doesn't want to be happy. His stock in trade is being angry, which gives him a mission in life, and a readymade excuse for everything. This starts off with the Trump tweet I cite below. It's impossible to rank all of the ways Trump offends me, but his insistence on recasting history to suit his prejudices is fundamental to all his other lies.

  • Arwa Mahdawi [08-27] Why does the MAGA elite love conspicuous cosmetic surgery? Picture of Kristi Noem.

  • Ashlie D Stevens [08-28] Don't buy the Cracker Barrel fallacy: "Online petitions and viral outrage give the illusion of influence — but real power lies elsewhere."

    • Katrina Vanden Heuvel [09-09] What was the Cracker Barrel skirmish really about? "Trump is repaying rural voters' loyalty by shafting them." Sure, but the thing to understand is that the right is really just a rage machine. Any sort of change can kick them into high gear.

  • Brian Karem [08-29] As America implodes, Trump can do anything he wants.

  • Laura Beers [09-02] The Orwellian echoes in Trump's push for 'Americanism' at the Smithsonian.

  • Elie Mystal [09-05] Donald Trump really is the biggest loser. For starters:

    The Trump administration repeatedly lost in court this week. A federal judge in California ruled that Trump violated the Posse Comitatus Act when he deployed federal troops to Los Angeles. A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that Trump violated the law when he attempted to cut off federal funding to Harvard. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that most of Trump's tariffs are illegal. And a panel of judges from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the most conservative and reactionary appellate court in the country — ruled that Trump's targeting of Venezuelans was an illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act.

    One reason for not celebrating is that the Supreme Court can still reverse most of these rulings. But they all reflect Trump actions, so (a) they've already had impact, and (b) frustrating them reinforced the idea that Trump needs even more support and power to overcome the forces against him and those he represents. This is a column which rounds up a lot of miscellany: notably this:

    In her new book, Amy Coney Barrett positions herself as a helpless cog in a legal machine that gives her no choice but to rule the way she does, even if she doesn't like it. As Joe Patrice explains over at Above the Law, her entire act is risible. But it's an act we've seen from every first-year, fascist-curious law student who wants to make a career as a Federalist Society judge.

    Mystal also references:

    • Elie Mystal [09-04] The military has officially entered the deportation business: "The administration's decision to deploy military lawyers as immigration judges is terrible and illegal, but when has that ever stopped Trump?"

    • Steve Vladeck [09-02] 176. Illinois v. Texas: "A quick look at President Trump's (apparent) plan to send uninvited and unfederalized Texas National Guard troops into Illinois — and how it could (and maybe should) quickly end up in the Supreme Court."

  • Amanda Marcotte [09-03] Trump's long weekend of humiliation: "The harder he tries to be a dictator, the more he's mocked by both Americans and foreign leaders." Same theme as Mystal's piece, but less obviously written by a lawyer:

    Alas, Trump is still alive, but there is a consolation prize for those who were holding vigil: He and the White House reacted with over-the-top defensiveness, removing all doubt that the infamous narcissist was feeling deeply embarrassed by the gleeful speculation of his demise.

    While it may be impossible to dissuade the faithful, it certainly isn't hard to get under il Duce's paper-thin skin. [Original draft had der Führer, but upon reflection I opted for the diminutive form. I also changed "thin" to "paper-thin" per Marcotte.]

  • Richard Luscombe [09-04] Trump's second presidency is 'most dangerous period' since second world war, Mitch McConnell says: "Former Senate leader likens administration's fixation with tariffs to isolationist policies of the US in the 1930s." As I'm not alone in pointing out, McConnell blew his chance to get rid of Trump during the second impeachment vote: had he and a handful of other Republicans voted to convict, Trump could have been disqualified under the 14th amendment from running again, which would have kept him off the ballot in 2024. At the time, it would have cost Republicans nothing, as Trump was already out of office.

  • Daniel Warner [09-05] Donald Trump's media domination. Pardon me while I scream: Why anyone has even the slightest interest in this flaming asshole is one of the few things about the world I find utterly incomprehensible. But Warner has a theory (or two):

    Like an avalanche, Trump news gathers speed and buries everything in its path only to pop up in another place. It's exhausting, and overwhelming. As for intentionality, the former Trump chief adviser Steve Bannon described the strategy in 2018, "The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit." . . .

    This is how the former CNN executive sees Trump's relation to the media:

    "Donald Trump was chosen by Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp. Mr. Thomson understands the media business better than all the rest. Mr. Thomson found a true believer in the power of television with highly addicted viewers, typically those offended by smart people. This was — still is — the Fox audience. The money flowed in from cable TV subscriptions and advertisers selling cheap goods."

    The relationship between Trump and the media is perfectly symmetrical. He wants to be front page every day. The media believes he sells. The result is that the public gets its dose of Trump news daily. So whether or not Trump sets out to headline the daily news, he manages to be there. The media can't get enough of him.

    This points to:

    • Stef W Kight [2017-09-22] The insane news cycle of Trump's presidency in 1 chart. While the topic labels are cryptic, and the events 8 years old, I remember literally every one of them, even though most are trivial and stupid, and those that aren't trivial (e.g., Putin, North Korea, repealing Obamacare) were handled as stupidly as possible.

  • David Friedlander [09-06] Trump bump: "The president has jumped into the mayor race. But is he helping Cuomo or Mamdani?" He probably sees this as win-win: if Cuomo does win, he can claim credit; if not, he gets an enemy he can hate from a distance -- actually two: Mamdani and New York City -- and he knows how to play that with his base.

  • Andrew Lawrence [09-08] Trump's strongman image got boos at the US Open, and perhaps that was the point: "It was just the authoritarian image Donald Trump hoped to project at the US Open: the president himself, looming from Arthur Ashe Stadium's giant screens like Chairman Mao at Tiananmen Gate, as he stood at attention for the national anthem." Also this:

    • Bryan Armen Graham [09-07] The USTA's censorship of Trump dissent at the US Open is cowardly, hypocritical and un-American: "By asking broadcasters not to show any protest against Donald Trump at Sunday's final, the governing body has caved to fear while contradicting its own history of spectacle." Doesn't this article just feed into his cult? Trump thrives on being hated more than any president since FDR (or probably ever). And is anything more American than hypocrisy? (I could riff on cowardice as well, but probably would wind up defending it.)

  • Radley Balko [09-08] Roundup: One month of authoritarianism. "Here's what happened in just one month of the Trump administration's dizzying push toward autocracy." This is a very long bullet list. It's likely he has more in the archives, but as with Amy Siskind's The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump's First Year (2018, 528 pp), it risks turning into numbing overkill. You really don't have to know everything bad that Trump has ever done to decide whether to vote him up or down. A fairly modest random sampling should suffice.

  • Moira Donegan [09-09] Trump apparently thinks domestic violence is not a crime.

  • John Ganz [09-09] Trump's petty-tyrant brand of fascism: "The GOP president is both a dire threat to democratic governance and a clownish mob boss."

  • Kojo Koram [09-09] From Washington to Westminster, the populist right needs to erase history to succeed. It's up to us to resist: Trump you know about. Farage is also pushing his own "patriotic curriculum."

  • Jeremy Varon [09-11] Trump is already at war:

    Trump's current penchant for military aggression has odd roots in his professed disdain for the "stupid wars" of recent decades. His "peace" persona is skin deep. Trump supported the Iraq War before it began, turning against it only when it bogged down.

    One gets little sense that he grew to question dodgy interventions based on judicious assessments of what conflicts are, for reasons of principle or national interest, worthy of military sacrifice. "Stupid wars" are for him simply ones that America can't decisively win. And winning is the ultimate measure of strength, or virtue, or sound policy.

    Trump's fondness for this view has long been clear. Recall his claim that Senator John McCain, for the sin of being captured, was "not a war hero." Or his disparaging the U.S. dead in a French World War Two cemetery as "losers" and "suckers" because "there was nothing in it for them." Even winners can be losers, when the victory is not a life-sparing blowout. True to form, Trump praises the "Department of War" moniker for sending "a message of victory."

    Military victory, most simply, means overwhelming one's foe, with minimal loss of American life. So Trump punches down, attacking those with little capacity or will to fight back. Hapless, alleged drug smugglers on the high seas are no match for U.S. missiles. Neither is the Venezuelan army, should President Maduro be baited into a response that triggers a full-bore U.S. assault. Nor can undocumented immigrants — vulnerable, frightened, often poor — physically resist ICE agents with big guns. Americans outraged at the assault on their communities and neighbors are stymied as well. The homeland, for Trump, is a soft target, with a near-guarantee of zero losses. Winning indeed.

    Actually, the Bushes aimed to "punch down" as well. The younger just underestimated the risks, as bullies are wont to do. The author has a book: Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror.

Democrats:

  • Jamelle Bouie [2024-12-18]: Now is not the time for surrender: Reminded of this because he quoted a chunk of it on Bluesky:

    This is a grave mistake. Trump's hand is not as strong as it looks. He has a narrow, and potentially unstable, Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a small, but far from filibuster-proof, majority in the Senate. He'll start his term a lame duck, with less than 18 months to make progress before the start of the next election cycle. And his great ambition -- to impose a form of autarky on the United States -- is poised to spark a thermostatic reaction from a public that elevated him to deal with high prices and restore a kind of normalcy. But Democrats won't reap the full rewards of a backlash if they do nothing to prime the country for their message.

    Obviously, the big miss here was that Congressional Republicans have been totally aligned with and subservient to Trump, so their thin majorities have held, even to the extent of bypassing their own filibuster rules in the Senate. Moreover, corporate America, including big media companies, have jumped at the opportunity to debase themselves to please Trump. (And they've kept very quiet whatever reservations they may have felt to his tariffs and other economic policies.) Much of this is unsurprising, given the way the election spun in its last couple months -- although I admit I resisted recognizing it at the time. But the last line is spot on, and you can prove it by noting that while Trump's popularity has steadily dropped since January, the Democrats not only haven't picked up his losses, they've actually lost approval alongside him.

  • Matthew Sheffield [2024-12-09] Local political ecosystems are vital to protecting democracy nationally: "Author Erik Loomis discusses how labor unions and liberal religious organizations preserve institutional memories and explain progressive viewpoints." Interview with Loomis, who has written books like A History of America in Ten Strikes, Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice, and Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe. First thing I was struck by here was the section "Democrats only talk to their voters for three months every two years." I would have followed that immediately with "but they talk to their donors all the time." The donors are their patrons, their constant companions, their friends, and ultimately their eyes and ears. And politician, like fishers, naturally value, and tend to obsess over, landing the big donor over the little voter. In the short term, that's seen as the key to success. Over the longer term, it's their ticket to the revolving door. The next section is "The decline of unions and liberal religion has significantly hurt the Democratic party." Everything else here is useful, ending with "Campaigns need coherent and simple narratives to win."

    I mean, that's the lesson Democrats need to take care of, right? You, having a candidate who could articulate a policy is not going to win. Nobody cares. Having a candidate that can articulate your hopes, your dreams, your fears, or your hatreds, that's a win. That's a much more winning approach, right?

    And they'd better learn that, right? Some, I don't know, like. The conditions in 2028 are likely to be different, right? So maybe a Josh Shapiro Gretchen Whitmer, some of these people on a fairly deep Democratic bench could win, but if they are going up against somebody, presumably not Donald Trump, but who can continue to channel the kind of Trumpian resentment.

    There's a very good chance that while we may think that these people are clowns, that they are in fact incredibly strong candidates because the everyday low information voter sees them as articulating their again, hopes, dreams, fears, and or hatreds. And if Democrats don't learn that. Then it's going to be very difficult for them to tap into what is a very clear desire for a populist politics in this country.

    And populism could go either way, right? Populism can be incredibly reactionary as in Trumpian populism, or it can be channeled for a progressive, for progressive aims as it was in the 1930s. Democrats have to figure out how to manage that. And if they don't, then people that we might think are idiots and clowns, like anybody who's been appointed into the Trump administration, like one of them is probably going to be the candidate in 2028, whether it's a Vance, or another candidate, or Laura Trump, I mean, or Dana White, the head of UFC, like maybe a perfect Republican candidate.

  • Harold Meyerson [08-28] The idiocy (both moral and strategic) of the Democratic National Committee: "At its meeting this week, the DNC opposed a ban on US provision of offensive weapons to Israel." The article stops there, but unfortunately the idiocy doesn't. This title can be recycled regularly.

  • Katrina Vanden Heuvel [09-03] What the Democrats can learn from Gavin Newsom's Trump mockery. I don't see Newsom as a viable presidential candidate, and I suspect his trolling will only reinforce that view, but I don't mind him having a little fun at Trump's expense, and given his target, it's hard to imagine that he could escalate into excess -- that may be a fundamental flaw in his strategy. But his example reminds us that Democrats are looking for someone who can and will fight back, and he understands that much, and is auditioning for the role.

  • Anthony Barnett [09-03] Stephen Miller calls Democrats a "domestic extremist organization": "Congressional Democrats should demand that he retract his grotesque claims or resign." No, they shouldn't. They should reply in kind, or just shrug him off, as in why should anyone care what a fascist troll thinks? He's so clearly obnoxious that you could use him as the public face of the Trump regime. Demanding an apology just grants him power he doesn't deserve.

  • Chris Lehmann [09-03] What makes Democrats so afraid of Zohran Mamdani? More on Mamdani:

  • Jeet Heer [09-05] Old, wealthy Democrats are sabotaging their won party: "The problem of gerontocracy includes the donor class."

  • Ross Barkan:

    • [09-05]: Imagining an imperial Democratic president: Sure, dream on. I expect the courts to spin on a dime, pretty much like they did when Trump took charge. The only things that might limit them are overwhelming popular support, and fresh legislation that explicitly allows a Democratic president to do what Trump can only do with executive orders. And if the courts still obstruct, you can impeach some miscreants, and create new court positions which can be filled with more reasonable jurists. But Biden and Obama wound up making extensive use of executive orders, especially after Congress was lost, and both took heat from Democrats for not going farther. Trump has demolished many of the inhibitions they felt, and many Democrats will push their next president to do much more, especially how important it has become to revise his rules and replace many of his personnel.

    • [08-31]: Democrats will have to shift on Israel. But when? That, of course, is a theme of his recent book on the 2024 election. More generally, Democrats have to decide whether they're for or against war, for or against racism, for or against universal rights, or they want to spend their remaining days trying to convince voters that Israel deserves to be exempted from the standards of justice and decency they expect everyone else to adhere to. The main reason Democrats lose elections isn't that people disagree with the ideals they like to tout. It's that they don't find Democrats to be credible advocates because, well, they're conflicted and incompetent.

    • [2021-03-28]: The three factions of the American left: "Understanding what it means when we talk about 'the left' in America." This is an old (2021) piece that popped up in some discussion somewhere. Seemed like it might be useful, although I'm having trouble following it. I think he's saying the three factions are: (1) The Socialist Left (specifically, the DSA, but he sees Sanders are the leader); (2) The Liberal Left (here Warren is a leader; but under them he also mentions "The Alphabet Left," of which WFP is the only example given; and (3) The Moderate Left, which needs some more explanation:

      The moderate voter is not more fiscally conservative, in a classic sense, than even the socialist voter, but the moderate retreats from certain left signifiers. Unlike the socialist, the moderate is proudly pro-capitalist. Unlike the liberal, the moderate does not treat patriotism or religion as an embarrassing or ironic vestige of a lost world. Many moderates earnestly embrace nationalism and American iconography. They go to church on Sundays and, if they live in small towns, might organize their lives around religious institutions. Secularism is the default in both the socialist and liberal left; moderates are far more likely to turn to religion to give meaning to their lives.

      There is good news for those who want Americans to embrace incredibly progressive or even socialistic economic policy: moderates are in full support, as long as it's packaged appropriately.

      He then goes on to say that "unlike 20 or 30 years ago, there is no moderate faction of the Democratic Party complaining about deficit spending or the growth of welfare. RIP the Atari Democrat. RIP neoliberalism." The "Atari Democrat" article is dated 2016. I've heard the term, but needed a refresher, so we're basically talking about Clinton + Silicon Valley. "Neoliberal" I know all too well, both as Charles Peters and Milton Friedman. I wouldn't dismiss the existence of either of them within the Democratic Party. What progress may have been made under Biden is that some of them may now agree that some things should be done to actually help labor and the poor, instead of just assuming that everyone who loses their job to globalization and financialization will land on some kind of ritzy "symbolic manipulator" job (per Robert Reich). But lots of Democrats like that are still around, still chasing money, even if they've loosened up a bit.

  • Isaac Chotiner [09-08] Texas's gerrymander may not be the worst threat to Democrats in 2026: An interview with Nate Cohn, "the New York Times' chief political analyst, on a consequential Supreme Court case and why Republicans are registering so many new voters."

  • Eric Levitz [09-10] Democrats can't save democracy by shutting down the government: "The party should only force a shutdown for its own political gain."

  • Gabrielle Gurley [09-12] Virginia special election shaves GOP House margin: "Democrat James Walkinshaw triumphs in a ginormous victory." This was one of the seats elderly Democrats won in 2024 then lost through death, so this isn't really a pickup. Another one, in Arizona, is up for a vote on Sept. 23.

  • Andrew Prokop [09-12] Democrats are on the verge of a dangerous mistake: "There's one big guardrail left on Trump's ambitions." He means the Senate filibuster. Republicans have used long used it to keep Democrats from passing much-needed reforms, or at least to dilute them to ineffectiveness. But if Democrats use the filibuster to block some Republican outrage? Republicans could just change the rules to get rid of the filibuster — as, indeed, they've already done to keep Democrats from blocking their extremist judicial nominations. Unexplained is what good a rule is if you can't use it, but they're free to use it against you? Not much, as far as I can see.

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

Current Affairs:

Ezra Klein [01-17] Democrats are losing the war for attention. Badly. Actually, just an interview with Chris Hayes, relating to his book, The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, with a title cleverly chosen to grab your attention. Why was Trump able to win with lies while Democrats struggle to make anyone aware of their accomplishments? Attention is one obvious metric which is skewed ridiculously in favor of Republicans and especially Trump. I've read Hayes' book, and he makes a lot of interesting points. But he also engages in hyperbole, because he knows the surest way to get attention is to stick your neck out, become conspicuous, and flaunt it as far as you can get away with it. And he wants attention as much as his subjects do. It is, as he admits, his business. So it's not surprising that he overrates it, especially its fungibility -- which in his business may translate directly into advertising revenues, but for most people the profit motive is less obvious. Still, it's useful as a prism, not least because it renders part of the scheme opaque.

  • Derek Thompson [02-28] The end of reading: Only an excerpt of a transcript from a podcast, probably got here from a link in the Klein/Hayes interview. One stat: "50 years ago, about 40 percent of high school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the past year compared to about 12 percent who hadn't read any. And now those percentages have flipped."

George Salis [06-30] Borne back ceasefully: a rare interview with Tom Carson: He was one of the rock critics Christgau cultivated in the late 1970s. I first heard about him when he wrote a review of Brian Eno's Another Green World that was good enough it almost bumped my assigned piece. I met him once in New York, uneventfully, and read him as regularly as I could, though not as often as my wife read his Esquire reviews (usually on the newsstand). He was one of two critics Christgau tapped to fill in while he was off doing the CG-70s book -- the other one I remember better, probably because he didn't do as good a job. So I had something of a bond with him, with mixed feelings, but he wrote a brilliant piece on 1945, especially the observation that winning WWII was the worst thing that happened to America. Shortly after that, he published a novel called Gilligan's Wake, and I felt like he could have written it just for me. (I knew the TV show intimately, and most of the literary and historical references -- not that I ever made any headway through Joyce, but that seemed unnecessary. The only choice he made that I strongly differed with was saying nice things about Bob Dole.) I still frequently refer back to a couple of key concepts from the novel: the notion of America's perpetual innocence illustrated by Mary-Ann's self-healing virginity; the argument that America exists only for a certain group of people: the true Americans. I became reacquainted with him when he edited my essay in the Christgau Festschrift Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough: A Rock & Roll Critic Is Something to Be.

Robert Kuttner [07-30] Tom Lehrer and Mort Mintz, RIP: "Both challenged American smugness, one with satire and the other with great journalism."

Daniel Felsenthal [08-01] A book called Fascism or Genocide that's reluctant to discuss either: A review of Ross Barkan's "engrossing, literary analysis of the 2024 election disappoints with its blinkered vision of US politics." The book is Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics. The title comes from a Palestinian activist's view of the Trump or Harris choice, although the review tells us Barkan was reluctant to go deeper into either topic (but especially Gaza). This sounds like a version of the book I've been contemplating on the 2024 election, perhaps one where the focus is on the cognitive dissonance that allowed voters for both candidates to ignore much of what each stood for (which in the case of Harris included democracy, at least as we knew it, and some semblance of justice under law and economic opportunity for many, if not really all). Instead, people voted on phantom fixations and whims, which tilted to the macabre, bequeathing us a suddenly real dystopia.

Nick Turse: National security fellow for The Intercept, has been covering the Trump military everywhere, with a unique specialty in Africa. I've touched on many of these stories above, and could have distributed them accordingly, but for now, let's keep them together to see the pattern:

David Dayen:

Sarah Jones [08-20] The manifest destiny of J.D. Vance. I can't say as the analogy occurred to me, but not since McKinley has there been an American president so ebullient about expanding American territory, from Greenland down into Mexico (or perhaps Venezuela is next?). One snag may be that land comes with people already on it, but Israel has some ideas about that (updating Hitler's use of America's own Manifest Destiny idea).

It's not hard to understand why Manifest Destiny might appeal to the Trump administration, and particularly its Department of Homeland Security, whose agents carry out another act of conquest, a purge they justify in the name of Western civilization. The administration has occupied the streets of Washington, D.C., because it wants to punish the people who live there, because it wants to remove immigrants who it does not like, and because it sees itself as a conquering force. The streets properly belong to it, and not to locals. Manifest Destiny was about blood and soil, too. "A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending," as DHS wrote in its post of Gast's work. Trump even used the term in his inaugural address this year.

Harold Meyerson [08-25] A federal appellate court finds the NLRB to be unconstitutional: "And just like that, it frees Elon Musk -- and any fellow employers -- to violate whatever rights their workers thought they enjoyed." This reverses 88 years of rulings upholding the act's constitutionality. It's like they're daring us to revolution.

The New Republic: David W. Blight edited a special issue on Trump Against History, asking "how is Trump changing our sense of who we are?" Probably a lot more to talk about here than I had time for. Titles:

  • Johann Neem: Trump is the enemy of the American Revolution: "He has produced a crisis much like the one the colonists faced two and a half centuries ago. Now it's our responsibility to uphold the Founders' legacy."

  • Molly Worthen: What besieged universities can learn from the Christian resurgence: "Educators can fight back against Trump's attacks by re-embracing 'old-fashioned' disciplines and ideas."

  • William Sturkey: Trump's white nationalist vision for the future of history: "The administration is using the tools of the state to influence — even poison — how America's racial history will be taught in our public forums and schools."

  • Edward L Ayers: Trump's reckless assault on remembrance: "The attempts of his administration to control the ways Americans engage with our nation's history threaten to weaken patriotism, not strengthen it."

  • Michael Kazin: The two faces of American greatness: "It is the task of historians to grapple with Trump's favorite concept — and to redefine it."

  • Jen Manion: Learning history is a righteous form of resistance: "It's a way to combat Trump's attempts at remaking the past to justify erasing protections for the most vulnerable."

  • James Grossman: "Indoctrination"? We call it "education." "It's not 'divisive' to teach about division. It's divisive to bury it."

  • Geraldo Cadava: The diversity bell that Trump can't un-ring: "The biggest problem with the history Trump wants to impose on us is that it never, in fact, existed."

  • Amna Khalid: Authoritarianism is made — and it can be unmade: ""Autocrats do not merely fade away; they have to be countered and stopped."

  • David W Blight: What if history died by sanctioned ignorance? "We must mobilize now to defend our profession, not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion." Includes a useful summary of the Nazi ascent in 1930s Germany (I edited this to use a numbered list):

    In Richard J. Evans's trilogy on the Third Reich, he shows indelibly how the Nazis achieved power because of eight key factors:

    1. the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate;
    2. widespread hatred for parliamentary democracy that had taken root for at least a decade all over Europe;
    3. the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities;
    4. the Nazis' ritualistic "dynamism," charisma, and propaganda machinery;
    5. the creation of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy
    6. the public manipulating and recrafting of history and forging Nazi mythology to fit their present purposes
    7. they knew whom and what they viscerally hated — communists and Jews — and made them the objects of insatiable grievance;
    8. vicious street violence, with brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town.

    All of these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of an Aryan racial utopia and a nationalism rooted in deep resentment of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, provided the Nazis the tools of tyranny.

    In 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many, though not all, of these techniques. Thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.

  • Leslie M Harris: The high price of barring international students: "Global collaboration is necessary for success, if not survival, in our hyper-connected world."

Trevor Jackson [08-25] The myth of clean energy: "Is all the hope placed in renewables an illusion?" Review of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. Part of the argument here is that new energy technologies don't directly replace old ones, and often require more use of the old ones, at least in the short term (e.g., a lot of oil and gas, and still some coal, goes into making the turbines that generate electricity from wind). That isn't news, and certainly doesn't discredit the shift from fossil to renewable energy sources. Fressoz is co-author of an earlier book, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us, which I've ordered.

Henry Giroux [08-29] Domestic terrorism and spectacularized violence in Trump's warfare state: I don't often read, much less cite, his pieces, because the language and hyperbole don't strike me as all that useful (e.g., Resisting the deadly language of American fascism; Against the erasure machine; Trump's reign of cruelty; Trump's theater of cruelty; Childicide in the age of fascist theocracies; Neoliberal fascism, cruel violence, and the politics of disposability; The nazification of American society and the source of violence). But we've entered a stage where reality is rising to meet its most fevered denunciation, so maybe we need to invoke the specter of nazi/fascism not to scare the naive but to grasp the full enormity of what is happening.

The spectacle operates both as distraction and as pedagogy. By dramatizing state violence as entertainment, whether through militarized parades, campaign rallies, or sensationalist media coverage, the Trump regime trains the public to see authoritarian repression as normal, even desirable. The spectacle is a form of civic illiteracy: it numbs historical memory, erodes critical thought, and recodes brutality as patriotism.

The spectacle is more than distraction; it is a smokescreen for systemic violence. Behind the theatrics lie black-site detention centers, the militarization of U.S. cities, and surveillance technologies that monitor everyday life. The media's complicity, obsessed with immediacy and balance, enables this process by masking the deeper truth: the rise of an authoritarian warfare state at home. . . .

Here the spectacle does not conceal fascism but embodies it. Each act dramatizes the message that Trump alone decides who is safe, who is punished, who is disposable. Reich's insight into the fascist "perversion of pleasure" is central: the staging of cruelty is not only meant to terrify; it is meant to gratify. Citizens are invited to experience the humiliation of the weak as a form of release, to find satisfaction in the punishment of the vulnerable. Theodor Adorno's warnings about the authoritarian personality come into sharp relief here: the blending of obedience and enjoyment, submission and aggression, produces subjects who come to desire domination as if it were freedom.

What emerges is an authoritarian economy of desire in which cruelty is transformed into theater. Images of militarized parades, mug shots of political enemies, or caged immigrants circulate across media platforms like advertisements for repression, producing both fear and illicit pleasure. The spectacle trains citizens to consume cruelty as entertainment, to eroticize domination, and to accept vengeance as the highest civic virtue. Watching becomes complicity; complicity becomes a source of satisfaction; satisfaction becomes a form of loyalty.

Besides, this piece led me to others, like:

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [09-01]: Defender of the backwoods: the good life of Andy Mahler.

  • [09-05]: Roaming Charges: Multiple megalomaniacs. Starts with the US attack on a boat near Venezuela. When I asked google for "us sinks boat near venezuela," AI replied:

    There are no recent or documented incidents of the United States sinking a boat near Venezuela, although there have been historical concerns about Venezuelan narcotics trafficking and tensions between the two nations regarding foreign involvement.

    However, further down the same page, we find:

    The Wikipedia entry notes:

    James Stavridis, a former US Navy admiral, characterized the strike and other US military activity around the same time as gunboat diplomacy intended to demonstrate the vulnerability of Venezuelan oil rigs and materiel. He wrote that drug interdiction was likely not the sole reason for the increased US military activity. On September 5th Trump ordered the deployment of 10 F-35 fighters, to conduct combat air patrols in the region and support the Southern Caribbean fleet, amid growing tensions. Following the flyover of the USS Jason Dunham, Trump gave permission to shoot down Venezuelan planes if they presented a danger to U.S. ships.

    In an exchange on X in which writer Brian Krassenstein said "killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime", Vice President JD Vance responded "I don't give a shit what you call it."

    Much more here, of course. Notable quote from Benjamin Balthasar: "It's funny how the Right likens everything to slavery, except slavery, much the way everything is antisemitism, except actual antisemitism."

  • [09-12] Roaming Charges: The broken jaws of our lost kingdom: Starts with a personal story about being shot at while protesting the Iraq war in 2003, then notes: "The murder of Charlie Kirk is awful, disgusting and about as American as it gets." He also notes that Trump said nothing about the recent assassination of Democrats in Minnesota, or the "173 shots at the CDC HQ in Atlanta last month," although he added that Trump's quiet "was probably welcome, given what he might have said." He then lists some of the right-wing incitements to further violence I noted below. He digs up more, of course, including a 2023 Kirk quote: "I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the 2nd Amendment. That is a prudent deal. It is rational." It's not often you see a right-winger put their body where their mouth has gone. St Clair also notes, "After these kinds of traumatic episodes, Fox News invariably tries to coax Trump into saying something humane, but time after time, he shows that he just can't do it."

    On other fronts, note:

    • The 400 richest people in the US are now worth a record $6.6 trillion. Their wealth grew by $1.2 trillion in the past year.

    St Clair also cited a tweet from Sen. Elissa Slotkin:

    We are in an AI Race with China right now. The last ti me we were in such a race - with Russia on nuclear technology - we won because we set up the Manhattan Project. We need that level of ambition again, for the modern age.

    I've often sympathized with Slotkin when she was critiqued from the left, but this is wrong on more levels than seemed possible in just three sentences. She assumes: that AI and nukes are comparable; that both are worth pursuing; that there is a race with a definite goal; that the "race winner" gets some kind of advantage; that the "race loser" is a failure; that "ambition" is measured by such a race. She also gets basic history wrong: the Manhattan Project was set up out of the misplaced fear that Germany was developing such weapons; Russia's nuclear program was a response to the US using nuclear weapons, and threatening Russia in what became known as the Cold War only after both sides had but respected and refrained from using nuclear weapons (although most vocal threats came from US warriors, from 1940s calls for preëmptive attack before Russia could respond in kind up through Nixon's "madman" theory). Also note that Slotkin is falling back on one of our dumbest tropes, the notion that declaring war proves we are serious -- although in examples like the "war on poverty" and "war on drugs," that seriousness quickly dissipated after the PR campaign, not so much for lack of serious effort as because war didn't work on abstract targets.

Harold Meyerson [09-01] Trump celebrates Labor Day as the most anti-union president ever: "His unbound union busting is one front of his war on democracy." More on labor:

Doug Muir [09-09] Five technological achievements! (That we won't see any time soon.) Crooked Timber's "resident moderate techno-optimist" presents "five things we're not going to see between now and 2050."

  1. Nobody is going to Mars.
  2. Speaking of space woo, we are not going to see asteroid mining.
  3. Coming down to Earth, we are not going to have commercial fusion power.
  4. There will be no superconductor revolution.
  5. There will be no useful new physics. No anti-gravity, telepathy, faster-than-light communication or travel, time-travel, teleportation booths, force fields, manipulation of the strong or weak nuclear forces, or reactionless drives. We're not going to get energy from the vacuum, or perpetual motion, or glowing blue cubes.
  6. Airships.

Matthew Duss [09-09] Encased in amber: "Biden's wars and the unmaking of liberal foreign policy." The subtitle suggests a ringing and much deserved indictment, but the article itself is just a review of Bob Woodward's latest insider blabfest, succinctly titled War. While Woodward has no opinions of whatever he writes about -- or perhaps I should say, conveys from his insider sources -- Duss is fairly admiring of Biden's "restraint" regarding Ukraine. While as I'm sure I've made clear by now, I mostly blame Putin, we still haven't seen a clear history on what Biden did or did not do between taking power and Putin's invasion. After all, it took Putin 8 years between the 2014 coup and secession and the 2022 invasion, so what spooked him? Where the record is clearer is how little Biden did after the invasion, and especially after the war stalemated, to negotiate a peace. That's been bad for Ukraine, bad for Russia, and bad for the world, including the US. But if Ukraine suggests that Biden and his crew didn't feel like peace was worth their effort, Gaza not only proved it, it showed that they had no regard for human rights, they had no clue how to talk about war, and they had no willpower to back up what few humanitarian sentiments they could muster. As Duss notes, not only did Biden's wars cost them the election, they still have no comprehension of their failures.

Jill Lepore [09-10] How Originalism killed the Constitution: "A radical legal philosophy has undermined the process of constitutional evolution." Another Atlantic article I can't read (and you probably can't either), on a subject various people have written entire books on (just from my roundup files: Erwin Chemerinsky, Madiba K Dennie, Jonathan Gienapp, Eric J Segall, Cass R Sunstein, Ilan Wurman), but none as long as Lepore's own new We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, which this is most likely tied to. The short definition is that "originalism" is whatever Antonin Scalia thinks at any given moment. While the article and book are no doubt interesting, you might start with a review:

David Dayen [09-10] Political violence and the reality distortion field: "Sadly, we've always had violence in America; what's different today is the aftermath, and the battle to define political opposition amid violence." The occasion for this article was the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed today. Dayen starts by decrying and condemning all political violence, and offers very little information about Kirk -- probably for the best, given that it's hard to say anything about Kirk that couldn't be misconstrued, especially by trigger-happy right-wingers, as suggesting that he had it coming. Dayen does place the shooting among the "47 episodes of mass violence on school campuses this year" (by the time of writing, Kirk's wasn't even the most recent). But his bigger point was how the right sought to exploit this shooting not just for political advantage but to direct violence against the left:

My view of this is not very controversial or provocative. It has been shared by every Democratic political leader who has made a statement about this, at least the hundreds that I've seen. But what I say in this moment, or what any of those leaders say, doesn't really matter when there's an open struggle, in these moments of confusion, to redefine reality.

"The Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization," said Sean Davis, a conservative activist who was merely echoing the words of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller just a couple of weeks ago. "Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination," said writer Tim Urban. "The Left is the party of murder," said incipient trillionaire Elon Musk on his personal microblogging site, X.

I'm not interested in collecting opinions about Charlie Kirk, but for an example for the first quoted paragraph, consider this from Barack Obama:

We don't yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie's family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.

As a non-believer, "praying" always triggers my bullshit detector, but then I start wondering what Obama's selection algorithm is for who he prays for -- I doubt that he has time to qualify thousands of Gazans (or Africans, or hundreds of ordinary American citizens) for personal attention (like knowing spouse names and counting children). And if he's so selective, why single Kirk out, except perhaps that he's semi-famous? Surely he's not a fan? I also don't care for the motivation clause, which suggests that condemning some murders turns on motivations. But then, as someone who's ordered and rationalized murders, that may be the way his brain works.

Along these same lines, Eric Levitz tweeted:

We do not yet have any confirmation of the shooter's political ideology or motivation.

In recent years, political violence has emanated from both the left and the right.

The way to honor the memory of a "free speech" proponent is not to crack down on progressive speech.

The casual "both sides do it" tone is completely baseless, as is claiming Kirk as a free speech proponent. And scoring shooters by incidental ideological attachments is just a pointless game, unless you can show that the ideology promotes violence (which, come to think of it, right-wingers often do, including implicitly in their opposition to regulating guns). In his usual too-little, too-late mode, Levitz qualified his "both sides" assertion with statistics, a chart show 444 total deaths from "Domestic Extremist-Related Killings in the U.S. by Perpetrator Affiliation," where right-wingers were responsible for 75%, Islamists for 20%, and "left-wing extremism (including anarchists & Black nationalists)" 4%, with 1% unaccounted for.

As for the second quoted paragraph, the first example I ran across was a tweet from someone named Matt Forney:

Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire. It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.

I don't know who this guy is -- but his X handle is @realmattforney, so he must think he's somebody special, and the image showed 687K views by 3:09PM, so less than 3 hours after the shooting -- but you have to not just reel in disgust but actually marvel at some pundit whose first thought after a news event was "what would Hitler do?" Similar, minus only the explicit Nazi appeal, reaction from Laura Loomer (who I have heard of):

It's time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.

If Charlie Kirk dies from his injuries, his life cannot be in vain.

We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all.

The Left is a national security threat.

Trump himself took up this same line of argument, here:

For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges and law enforcement officials.

And while right-wingers are lambasting Bluesky for "cheering the assassin," the closest thing to an off-color comment I've seen there was from "Kim," who wrote:

Remember while they are chastising you for not mourning a dead Nazi, these are the same cunts who cheered Kyle Rittenhouse and gave him a television contract.

Calling Kirk a Nazi may be rude, and may even be technically inaccurate (not something I'm expert enough, or interested enough, to argue one way or the other), but its relationship to terrorism isn't real, not even in some hazy stochastic correlation. Trump just fixates on it because it hits close to home. But the use of violent hate speech is hundreds or maybe thousands of times more prevalent on the right than on the left. It's so common it rarely gets noticed. But the incredible whining on the rare occasion the tables get turned is pretty disgusting.

By the way, everyone dies in vain. That may not be right, but it's just the way the world works. That's just a rhetorical device that sounds sensible until you give it any thought. Someone should write up a full guidebook to how to make bogus right-wing arguments, not because the right needs one, but to simplify deciphering -- much like Gramsci argued that Machiavelli wrote The Prince not for actual princes, who grew up learning those tricks, but for the rest of us, to understand what they were doing.

More background on Kirk and/or reaction to his shooting:

  • A Mighty Girl [09-10] Three months, two political killings: the poison in our politics. The other assassination featured here was Emerita Melissa Hortman, a Democratic leader of the Minnesota House, although her husband, also killed, was mentioned only in passing (see 2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators.

  • James H Williams [10-10] New York Yankees hold moment of silence for Charlie Kirk.

  • Rev. Graylan Scott Haglar [09-11] The killing of Charles James Kirk: Violent speech leads to violence.

  • Susan B Glasser [09-11] Did Trump just declare war on the American left? "After Charlie Kirk's tragic killing, the President speaks not of ending political violence but of seeking political vengeance." Well, that's what he said. Granted, he's sometimes unclear on what he can and cannot do, and on when and if what he says will be taken seriously by his staff, his fans, and everyone else. But what he says does give you some insight into what he's thinking and what he wants to see happen, which is mostly evil.

  • Avishay Artsy/Noel King [09-11]: What Charlie Kirk meant to young conservatives: "The late Talking Points USA [sic] leader built a movement that will outlive him."

  • Ben Burgis/Meagan Day [09-11]: Charlie Kirk's murder is a tragedy and a disaster: This joins "most on the Left [who] have rightly condemned his murder," but focuses more on the threat of right-wing vengeance for martyrdom, which they worry may be facilitated by failing to show due remorse and contrition. No doubt the treat is real. But why should we set ourselves up for a moral test, and blame ourselves for offenses they've long wanted to do, that Kirk himself was at the center of. It's not like Kirk ever felt the slightest twinge of guilt over the genocide in Gaza, or all sorts of other offenses. He lived to amass power to inflict terror, and his followers have no interest in anything but exploiting his death to further those same goals. I don't know how to stop them, except by making clear how horrible what they want to do really is. But blaming anyone other than the one who killed him won't help. Nor does offering sympathy when all it will do is inflate his importance and be used to hurt others.

  • Eric Levitz [09-11]: The right's vicious, ironic response to Charlie Kirk's death: "They're calling him a martyr for free speech as they demand a violent crackdown on progressive dissent." Even here, and even though he clearly knows better, he can't help but kick at some phantom leftists to burnish his both-sidesism.

  • Joan Walsh [09-11]: Let's not forget who Charlie Kirk really was: "The right-wing influencer did not deserve to die, and we shouldn't forget the many despicable things he said and did."

  • Ian Ward [09-12]: Why Charlie Kirk had no counterpart on the left: "Over the past decade, Kirk built an entirely new infrastructure for the GOP." This seems quite plausible, not that I've ever had any interest in understanding how this sort of politics works.

  • Chris Hedges [09-12]: The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk: He calls the killing "a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration."

    His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.

    Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.

    "We have to have steely resolve," said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show "War Room," adding, "Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are." . . .

    The cannibalization of society, a futile attempt to recreate a mythical America, will accelerate the disintegration. The intoxication of violence — many of those reacting to Kirk's killing seemed giddy about a looming bloodbath — will feed on itself like a firestorm.

    The martyr is vital to the crusade, in this case ridding America of those Trump calls the "radical left."

    It seems significant that Bannon called his program "War Room" long before the killing, to show us that he had already resolved to wage war, long before Kirk gave him excuse and rationalization. It's worth noting that while Democrats seek to marginalize the left, reducing us to a harmless minority, right-wingers insist on obliterating us. This suggests that they fear something more fundamental, like exposure. They want a public that follows them uncritically, unaware that there is any other alternative.

  • Alain Stephens [09-12] Charlie Kirk's assassination is part of a trend: spiking gun violence in red states: "It's not Washington or Chicago but Republican-run, reliably right-wing states that lead the nation in gun violence rates."

  • Elizabeth Spiers [09-12] Charlie Kirk's legacy deserves no mourning: "The white Christian nationalist provocateur wasn't a promoter of civil discourse. He preached hate, bigotry, and division."

  • Elie Mystal [09-12]: How to canonize a white supremacist: "On the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk, the certain blowback, and this country's raging gun problem." One piece Mystal spend some time critiquing is Ezra Klein [09-11]: Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.

  • Zach Beauchamp

    • [09-12]: Let's be honest about Charlie Kirk's life — and death: "We can hold two thoughts in our head at the same time." Sure, but oddly enough the right can't do honest: to them it's only how can this help us and/or hurt them (which in their zero-sum worldview amount to the same)? People who can hold two thoughts can be conflicted. They can feel ambivalent. They can act confused. Carried too far, felt too intensely, they can be schizophrenic: floundering, acting in contradictory ways, even lapsing into catatonia. The right have it so much easier. They're wrong, but at least they're sure of themselves. They can act, boldly, decisively, Too bad they're sociopaths.

      Ok, I'm just riffing on the line. The article sticks to its subject. Beauchamp says, "I want you to think about two sentences," but when I do I'm not sure the distinction they make is significant, or even that he's deciphering them right. Inflection, which isn't clear written down, would reveal more than order. He cites a lot of pieces (some cited elsewhere in this section, some I'm not bothering with), then attempts to draw a set of "red lines" around what one can and cannot say, proscribing every other possible reaction — especially ones that are quite natural for those who have been personally injured by Kirk's bigotry. I'm not saying Beauchamp's wrong, and I agree that conscientious leftists should avoid unnecessary offense, but before Kirk and his cohort can lecture us on how to speak, they need to show some discretion themselves.

    • [09-11]: Our country is not prepared for this: "On the horrible murder of Charlie Kirk — and the threat to democracy it created."

  • Christian Paz [09-12]: How Charlie Kirk remade Gen Z: "Three reasons his message resonated so strongly with young conservatives." The third is the most interesting: "He tapped into a nascent oppositional culture on campuses, and among youth." I don't really get how or why, or even how much, but this doesn't seem right, and certainly not necessarily so.

  • Jamelle Bouie [09-13]: Charlie Kirk didn't shy away from who he was. We shouldn't either.

    It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn't seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

    But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk's influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.

    Also notable by Bouie:

    • [09-10]: They don't want to live in Lincoln's America: A "response, of sorts, to Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, whose speech for 'national conservatives' was a direct rebuke of the creedal nationalism of the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg." I'm not surprised that right-wingers should hate iconic credos of American liberalism like "all men are created equal" and "government of, by, and for the people" -- I save my own ire for the avowed liberals who are so quick to sell their fellow citizens out. But it's rare, and perhaps a sign of the times, to see "conservatives" like Schmitt come out so explicitly against the original aspirations of American patriotism.

    • [08-27] We are not 'property of Donald Trump'. "The White House does not belong to Donald Trump. It is the property of the United States -- of the American people." "The Smithsonian Institution does belong to Donald Trump, either." Yet Trump feels entitled to remake both in his own image, with no consult or consideration of anyone else.

  • John Ganz [09-13] Reflections on violence: "Two reasons for Kirk's murder." The 2nd amendment, and the 1st. I don't particularly agree with either explanation, or with the first section below: I think it's possible to objectively distinguish hate speech, and that it should also be protected as free speech, although one should also be free to reply, even in kind. The real variable is power (as the 2nd section below notes), and that is not symmetrical either in fact or in theory: it is almost invariably the right that feels entitled to suppress the speech of others, or to require that their own favored speech be propagated, because their notion of order requires power to establish and maintain, and cannot withstand scrutiny. (I'm not denying that there are people who identify with the left who are tempted to take up the tools of the right, especially when they have been victimized, and that such people become more and more dangerous as they gain power, but it is not their leftness that drives them to abuse power — it is power itself.)

    It's long been my contention that almost no one really believes in free speech in principle; people believe free speech is what we do, hate speech is what they do. It's actually a difficult principle to hold to without contradiction. . . .

    Norms of civility are also impossible to enforce without abrogating someone's freedom of expression. For instance, some believe that at this time one should refrain from criticizing Kirk and his ilk. That's an exercise of power. Calls to decorum exist to circumscribe what can be said. . . .

    I think Charlie Kirk made the country a worse place. I believe his murder makes the country even worse. But I also won't engage in the dirty rhetorical trick that slyly suggests that a speaker created the unruly conditions for his own murder, as that late lamented beau idéal of civility, William F. Buckley, once did about Martin Luther King Jr. I opposed both the substance and form of Kirk's politics and still do. That's my opinion, and I feel it's a reasonable opinion shared by many — by millions in fact — although there are now efforts to drown it out as being unacceptable and disrespectful to the dead. I consider such talk tantamount to intimidation and blackmail, and I resent it. It's the same kind of droning idiocy and enforced conformity that led us from 9/11 to the destruction of civil liberties and to disaster in Iraq.

  • Media Matters [09-10] Fox News host on mentally ill people who commit crimes: "Just kill them": Brian Kilmeade. Given the people Trump has pardoned, and the ones he wants to prosecute, it's hard to give him or any other Republican any credit for anything they say about "law and order."

  • Intelligencer Staff [09-12] Charlie Kirk's assassination and the manhunt for his killer: What happened: "A running account of the shooting and its aftermath." This is the first piece on the shooter I've seen, and as one of the subtitles puts it, "Misinformation about the suspect is all over the place." As I tried to point out before, I don't really care what his motivations and/or identities are. But one tweet by Zachary D Carter seems fairly plausible:

    I see no point in searching for left/right valence in Tyler Robinson. He fits the school shooter archetype: young, disaffected, ideologically amorphous, extremely online and raised in gun culture. The theater of such violence is just expanding to include political assassination.

  • Joseph L Flatley [09-11]: Death of a troll "Charlie Kirk, 1993-2025." Like the author, one of the first things I thought of on hearing of Kirk's assassination was the 1967 assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell. Maybe Kirk wasn't as flagrant a Nazi as Rockwell, but Rockwell never had a shred of respectability or influence, and his killing had no discernible consequences or import. It merely removed a shit stain of an individual from the public eye. Kirk differs not in being a better person but in having rich and powerful promoters, who still seek to use his death for their own gain. One thing I had forgotten was that Rockwell was killed by one of his own disgruntled followers. Makes sense. Who else would consider him worthy of a bullet? By the way, good pull quote here: "Charlie Kirk died as he lived — making very little sense."

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas, but maybe I should just use it to bookmark some of our leading horribles.

  • Donald J Trump:

    • The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of "WOKE." The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made. This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE is BROKE. We have the "HOTTEST" Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.

    • Here's another one, which seems to be Trump reminiscing about his days as a Democrat:

      The confused and badly failing Democrat Party did nothing about Jeffrey Epstein while he was alive except befriedn him, socialize with him, travel to his island, and take his money! They knew everything there was to know about Epstein, but now, years after his death, they, out of nowhere, are seeming to show such love and heartfelt concern for his victims. Does anyone really believe' that? Where were they during his very public trials, and for all of those years before his death? The answer is, "nowhere to be found." The now dying (after the DOJ gave thousands of pages of documents in full compliance with a very comprehensive and exacting Subpoena from Congress!) Epstein case was only brought back to life by the Radical Left Democrats because they are doing so poorly, with the lowest poll numbers in the history of the Party (16%), while the Republicans are doing so well, among the highest approval numbers the Party has ever had! The Dems don't care about the victims, as proven by the fact that they never did before. This is merely another Democrat HOAX, just like Russia, Russia, Russia, and all of the others, in order to deflect and distract from the great success of a Republican President, and the record setting failure of the previous administration, and the Democrat Party. The Department of Justice has done its job, they have given everything requested of them, it's time to end the Democrat Epstein Hoax, and give the Republicans credit for the great, even legendary, job that they are doing. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!

  • I've seen several this several times, without a source:

    Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul—all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn't but has always been—arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel. It is America's shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn't just lose its soul—it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.

    I would have left out the "draft dodger" bit, which I consider a mark of real courage (although not really in Trump's case).

  • cassius marcellus clay [08-23]: [PS: sorry, lost the link]

    in 10 yrs dem voters asks have gone from "please improve something" to "please stop trump/fix what is being broken" to "you dont even need to accomplish anything just pretend to have the same contempt for the GOP that you do for your voters" and the answer has been "no, send us $3" every time

  • Doris Ravenfeather Gent [08-17]: Meme with picture of Putin and caption: "we did not get Trump elected because we like Trump. We hate America, and he is weak and stu pid, and that is good for us." Gent comments:

    No doubt this is Putin's thought process . . . it may not be an actual quote, but definitely believable . . . Because Trump is weak and Stupid and very manipulative! . . . Annnd, Agent Krasnov is and has been an asset for Putin all along.

    I seriously doubt this, on many counts (not Trump being weak and stupid; while that clearly hurts America, how, or whether, that helps Russia is a different; but first you have to figure out what Putin wants, rather than just assuming he started with hating America, and deriving everything from that, projecting your own global ambitions onto a country with limited means for attaining them). I am saddened to say that the meme was forwarded by a local leftist friend, who isn't normally affiliated with the warmongering Democratic cabal, which just goes to show how poorly the world is understood by even our friends, and how much work it's going to take

  • Nate Silver: not a direct link to something that evidently appeared on X (where it looks like an attempt to flatter the algorithm). Normally "more" is followed by "than" (not "that"), but that incoherency is easily lost in trying to imagine what the fuck "Blueskyism" might possibly mean, especially if you assume that it must fit somewhere in the remaining tangle of nebulous concepts.

    Electorally speaking it's more important for Democrats to avoid Blueskyism that leftism. Not that Bluesky is important but it embodies all the characteristics that make progressivism unappealing to normal people. If you could subtract those the left would win more often.

    Kim draws more conclusions from this than I would, including, "he's a miserable being choosing a miserable life when choosing the be less miserable requires so little action from him." I'm more of the view that he's a spreader of misery than a victim.

  • Dave Roberts [09-01]: Tweet and additional comments, something that could have been said more succinctly and calmly in 2 or 3 paragraphs, but for the record, let's unravel it here:

    To me, the lesson of the pandemic is a very familiar one, although as far as I can tell, no one is talking about it or learning it (which is also familiar). It's about the contrast between America's two political parties.

    When Covid popped up, the parties' reactions were extremely on brand.

    Dems, America's A students, scrambled to do the responsible thing. Strained, sweated to do the responsible thing, to be seen doing the responsible thing, to get the gold star from the (imaginary) teacher.

    Now, of course there were lots of decisions made by Dems in the heat of crisis, with insufficient information, facing no-win trade-offs, that one could go back and second guess. (Indeed, that is US pundits' favorite indoor sport!) Perhaps you would have made the trade-offs differently.

    But the entire Dem professional establishment was desperately trying to do the right thing & be responsible.

    Contrast: immediately upon the arrival of the virus, the right started spreading insane conspiracy theories, attacking public health officials, & refusing to act in solidarity.

    At every single second, they worked their hardest to destroy trust, to foment doubt & anger & resentment, to prevent solidarity.

    And those lies mattered. The vaccine skepticism deliberately spread by the right led to 100s of 1000s of preventable deaths. Again: they caused mass death.

    And then afterward -- this is the part that makes me feel crazy -- all the retrospective analysis & discussion shit on Democrats. They've been on the defense ever since, criticized from all quarters for this or that decision. Much of that criticism is fact-free bullshit, but . . .

    . . . even if you buy it all, surely the party that worked desperately to save lives & end the pandemic deserves more credit, a higher grade, than the party that worked desperately to spread lies & get people killed! Surely they're not the ones that should be apologizing!

    But it's always like this. Democrats try to do the right thing. They fall short, like humans do. Everyone teams up to shit on them.

    Republicans don't even bother pretending. They lie, they smear, they destroy lives, they get people killed, & they face NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT.

    Somehow our diseased information environment has produced the net outcome that the pandemic is considered a political problem for Dems, not the party that lied about it & got people killed at every juncture. The party that tried, but not perfectly, to save lives, is being forced to apologize.

    I've written a million threads on this theme, it's pointless, I know. But it's insane. Dems have to try, to be responsible, to please everyone. Republicans just have to jump around like fucking gibbons, throwing shit at the wall, and if they occasionally, accidentally hit something . . .

    . . . it's their targets who must apologize. They're never held responsible for the lies. Never held responsible for getting so many people killed. Never held responsible for anything. It's just the people who care, who try, that we hold responsible, that we shit on & demonize. Never the gibbons.

    Think about it. "Dems were too zealous in trying to prevent the spread of the virus" is, in US politics, a greater disadvantage, a bigger problem, than "Republican lies got hundreds of thousands of Americans killed for no reason."

    Just a pathetic fucking country. Pathetic.

    Adding one thing: this whole dynamic is neatly replicated around the issue of climate change. Dems take shit constantly: they're acting too fast, too slow, doing the wrong things, focusing on the wrong tech, bad Dems!

    GOP gibbons just throw shit & lies & block all policy & that's fine I guess.

    Dems care, and try, and for that are punished.

    GOP lies, hurts people, doesn't give a shit, and is rewarded.

    Various comments, including this from Ben Weinberg:

    The way this pathetic state of affairs is such a mass scale self-inflicted regression feels unique to our history. While people went thru far worse for the good of the country, this is the most unsympathetic populace we've ever had.

    My belief is that big tech decided technofascism was preferable to regulation and tried to align algorithms to that in late 2021-22. The idea of a shift absent that just doesn't hold up.

    I don't put a huge amount of stock in the notion that Democrats care where Republicans don't. Another way of looking at this is to go back to Karl Rove's argument that Democrats are bound to study reality, while Republicans are free and bold enough to act and, thereby, create their own better reality. Democrats responded to this by embracing the "reality-based community," but it also locked them into an orbit of conventional thinking where it became impossible to do anything that wasn't underwritten by their corporate sponsors. In effect, they substituted their own phony reality, which constrained them as apologists for the status quo. Democrats sometimes remind me of the "shoot and cry" Israelis, who could never see a way to avoid a war they were bound to regret. And while they could point to their crying as proof that they're living, caring humans, they're effectively no different from the shameless right-wingers they hope to guilt-trip. It's a losing proposition, because if you're going to shoot anyway, it makes sense to go with the side that's really into shooting.

  • Bari Weiss [09-12]: Matthew Yglesias responded to this, adding that "the core of free speech and a liberal society is precisely that I don't need to agree with the hagiographic accounts of Kirk's life and work to find his murder unacceptable and chilling."

    Someone in the newsroom said that this shattering event feels like the aftermath of another Charlie: Charlie Hebdo. It was a decade ago that Islamists burst into the offices of the satirical Paris newspaper and murdered 12 people who worked there.

    One similarity was that the killings were condemned by people all across the left-right political spectrum, as opposed to the killings that are only condemned by the left. Another similarity is that in both these cases, the right jumped on their victimhood as an excuse to foment violence against their supposed enemies. One might contrast this with, say, the bombing of Gaza, where several US Senators skipped the "hopes and prayers" and jumped straight into cheers and jeers, like "finish the job!"

  • Keith Edwards [09-12]: asks "Why did Laura Loomer delete this [tweet from 7/13/25]?"

    I don't ever want to hear @charliekirk11 claim he is pro-Trump ever again. After this weekend, I'd say he has revealed himself as political opportunist and I have had a front row seat to witness the mental gymnastics these last 10 years.

    Lately, Charlie has decided to behave like a charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next.

    Here's another (or possibly just longer) Loomer tweet attacking Kirk. Evidently Kirk's treason against Trump was in criticizing Trump's Israel-directed bombing of Iran.

  • erictastic:

    He was killed on camera. No one's family deserves to have to witness that. It's unthinkably cruel that people would then go on the internet and use their platform to say about an innocent man that "I don't care that he's dead." "He's not a hero." "He's a scumbag." "He shouldn't be celebrated."

    I'm talking about George Floyd. You thought I was talking about Charlie Kirk? No, those are actual quotes BY Charlie Kirk about George Floyd. Outrageous that anyone would say that of the dead, right?

    Further down my Facebook feed, I ran across this, which quoted California D governor Gavin Newsom:

    I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate. His senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence.

    The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate — never through violence.

    I shouldn't complain about safe pablum coming from politicians, who know better than most that anything else will get them crucified. I also don't mind the occasional ironic twist that presents a foe as an unwitting ally, as long as it is remotely credible and/or amusing. But this is more than a bit excessive, and it makes you wonder who Newsom knows, and why.

Current count: 321 links, 19901 words (25023 total)

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Sunday, August 17, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 28 days ago, on July 20.

This file came together in several widely separated spurts, between which it slowly accreted. The time spread is such that I no longer have any real sense of structure or coverage. It's not clear to me what I looked at, and what I'm missing. Several pieces led to long digressions, some of which I may go back to and refine into distinct posts in my new Notes on Everyday Life newsletter. While whatever I write there will eventually show up on my website, I promise that it will be more focused there, as well as delivered direct to you via email, than the piles of scattered notes I've been assembling here. So please consider subscribing.

The first section here are major categories, where I didn't wait for a keynote article. These are not necessarily regular features.

Epsteinmania: As far as I'm concerned, the Epstein-Trump story is a complete waste of time. The facts have been around for a long time now, and hardly anyone outside of the news media and the kiddie pool of the DNC care. The only thing that keeps the story going is how Trump keeps finding novel ways to deny it. All he has to do to shut up, and it will be gone within a couple news cycles. That he keeps it going suggests that there are other things he doesn't want us to talk about. Indeed, there is a lot, as the Walsh article below utterly fails to disclose.

  • David Dayen [07-15] Jeffrey Epstein Is a Policy Issue: "It's about elite immunity, the defining issue in America for more than two decades." No, the defining issue is increasing inequality. Warping the (in)justice system is an inevitable side-effect, but Epstein isn't exactly proof for "elite immunity": no doubt he got favorable treatments, but he wound up dying in jail. Maybe Trump is proof, but under pretty extraordinary circumstances. (That Trump's exception will make the system even worse is extremely likely.) Also, I think the both-sidesism here is way out of bounds. I agree that Democrats suck up to the rich more than they should, but virtually all of them accept that there are rules that everyone (even presidents) have to live by. Trump sees power as purely partisan. Even if he only supports "elite immunity" for elites on his side.

  • Ryan Cooper [07-18] Epstein Signals the End of Donald Trump's Crackerjack Crisis Management Style: "For a decade, his chump fan base automatically believed his lies — until now."

  • Eric Schliesser [07-21] On the Epstein Files; and Corruption. "It is a curious fact that in our public culture hypocrisy is treated as a worse sin than many actual crimes."

  • James D Zirin [07-24] Epstein and Trump: Why We're Unlikely to See the Files: "Judges will probably keep the Epstein files sealed, Bondi seems unlikely to release anything, and the Supreme Court's version of blanket presidential immunity will thwart any criminal case against Trump."

  • Allison Gill [08-01] Someone Waived Ghislaine Maxwell's Sex Offender Status to Move Her to a Minimum Security Camp in Texas.

  • Maureen Tkacik [08-01] Making America Epstein Again: "Trump's transactional ethics are making the US a refuge for criminals. This mirrors something Israel has done for years." I'm a bit surprised by the Israel angle here, not that I have any reason to doubt it. More can be found here:

    • Mouin Rabbani [07-25] Israel: Safe Haven for Pedophiles? "An examination of Darryl Cooper's claim that Israel functions as a safe haven for criminals and pedophiles escaping justice."

  • Peter Rothpletz [08-02] The simple way Democrats should talk about Trump and Epstein: "The scandal has haunted the president in part because of a truth voters already feel: Republicans protect elites."

  • Rebecca Solnit [08-03] The problem is far bigger than Jeffrey Epstein: "Treating the scandal as an aberration misunderstands the global epidemic of violence against women." My first reaction was that this is an instance of claiming a story for one's other crusade, much like how every fire or hurricane gets turned into a lecture on global warming, or every case of fraud can be turned into an indictment of capitalism. That works, of course, because there is truth in the larger stories, but it can also cover up peculiarities that are interesting on their own. In this case, while Epstein may share in the bad habits of many other men, what's distinctive about his case is the extraordinary wealth he held, and was able to use to get his way. (I have no idea whether violence was involved or implied, as in most other cases of rape — a possible weak link in Solnit's argument — but power is almost always backed up with the threat of force.) Still, while I wouldn't have approached this story in this way, I agree with Solnit's conclusion:

    The piecemeal stories — "here is this one bad man we need to do something about" — don't address the reality that the problem is systemic and the solution isn't police and prison. It's social change, and societies will have changed enough when violence against women ceases to be a pandemic that stretches across continents and centuries. Systemic problems require systemic responses, and while I'm all for releasing the Epstein files, I want a broader conversation and deeper change.

    I'd just shift the focus to Epstein's wealth, and the great power we concede to people with such wealth. I'm not saying that every billionaire is inherently evil, but those who have impulses in that direction are empowered by their wealth to pursue them. Epstein is an example of that, and he's far from the only one.

  • Judith Butler [08-05] Trumpists against Trump: St Clair quoted this bit, while noting that "in the latest Pew Survey, Trump's popularity among his own voters has fallen by 10%." I'm skeptical. (The 10% certainly seems credible, as well more than that was based on gross misunderstanding of who they were voting for, but of this being the specific issue that moved them.)

    Trump insists that the whole Epstein affair is a "hoax" and that his own followers are "stupid" and "weaklings." Their reaction has been intense and swift, since Trump now sounds like the elitists who disparage them — elitists like Hillary Clinton, who called them "a basket of deplorables." Trump scoffs at their complaints, noting that his supporters have nowhere else to go. They feel not only deceived by their hero but demeaned, insulted and outraged, the way they felt when Democrats were in power.

    Still, Butler's point that Trump's a whiny bitch is on the mark, and more of his voters are likely to come around to that view, even if they can't find anyone else to vote for.

  • Bryan Walsh [07-26] Four stories that are more important than the Epstein Files [PS: This entry was the basis for Notes on Everyday Life: Four Stories]: This piece should have been an easy lay up. Instead, Walsh has done the impossible, and come up with four stories even more inane and useless than the Epstein Files:

    1. America's dangerous debt spiral: maybe if he was talking about personal debt, but he means the old federal debt sawhorse, which Trump is pumping up (but lying about, because deficits only matter when Democrats might spend them on people).
    2. A global hunger crisis: he's talking about places like Nigeria, with just one side mention of Gaza, even more casual than "surges in food prices driven by extreme weather"; while climate change could be a major story, the most immediate food crises in the world today are caused by war.
    3. A real population bomb: the complaint that American women aren't having enough babies.[*]
    4. A generational security challenge: here he's complaining about America not being able to produce enough ships and missiles, with the usual China fearmongering, but no regrets about squandering stockpiles on Ukraine and Israel.

    The title works as clickbait, as I imagine there are lots of people out there thinking there must be more important matters than Epsteinmania. And I could imagine this as an AI exercise: gimme four topics that sound big and important but aren't widely covered, except for scolding mentions by fatuous frauds. Still, as usual, natural stupidity is the more plausible explanation — at least the one my life experience has trained my neurons to recognize.

    To some extent, the Epstein-Trump scandal recapitulates the conspiracy-mongering after Vincent Foster's death. I don't care about either enough to sort out the sordid details. But this got me wondering about a 1990s edition of "Four stories that are more important than Vincent Foster's death." I'm not going to hurt my brain by trying to imagine what Walsh might come up with, but these strike me as the big stories of Clinton's first half-term:

    1. Clinton's surrender of his "it's the economy, stupid" platform, which he campaigned and won on, to Alan Greenspan and "the fucking bond market," effectively embracing Reagan's "greed is good" policies and "the era of big government is over."
    2. Clinton's surrender to Colin Powell of his promise to end discrimination against gays in the military, which was not only a setback for LGBT rights but the end of any prospect of a peace dividend following the end of the Cold War, as Clinton never challenged the military again; they in turn were able to dictate much of his foreign policy, laying the groundwork for the "global war on terror," the expansion of NATO, the "pivot to Asia," and other horrors still developing.
    3. Clinton's prioritization of NAFTA, which (as predicted) demolished America's manufacturing base, and (less publicized at the time) undermined the political influence of unions and triggered the mass influx of "illegal immigrants" — factors that Republicans have taken advantage of, not least because they could fairly blame worker hardships on Democrats.
    4. Clinton's health care fiasco, a bill so badly designed and ineptly campaigned for that it set the right to health care back by decades (while ACA was better, it still contained the corrupt compromises of the Clinton program, and still failed to provide universal coverage).

    It took several years to clarify just how important those stories actually were (or would become). It's taken even longer to appreciate a fifth story, which is arguably even greater and graver than these four: the commercialization of the internet. At the time, this was regarded as a major policy success, but one may have second thoughts by now. The Clinton economy was largely built on a bubble of speculation on e-businesses. While some of that bubble burst in 2000-01, much of it continues to inflate today, and its effect on our world is enormous.

    But in 1992-93, Republicans were so disgusted as losing the presidency to a hayseed Democrat like Clinton — especially one who claimed to be able to do their pro-business thing better than they could — that they latched on to petty scandal. They flipped the House in 1994, largely on the basis of checking account scandal. Bringing down Clinton was a bit harder, but started with flogging the Foster story. It grew more important over time, despite everyone agreeing that there was nothing to it, because it ensconced Kenneth Starr as Clinton's permanent prosecutor, uncovering the Lewinsky affair, leading to the sham impeachment, and more significantly, his circling of the wagons, which turned the DNC into his personal political machine, eventually securing Hillary Clinton's doomed nomination, and Trump's rise to power.

    I'm not really sure yet which four stories I'd pick if I had to write this article — mostly because there are so many to choose from, and they overlap and are replicated and reflected in various guises everywhere the Trump administration has influence. While the wars trouble me the most, and gestapo tactics initially directed at immigrants are especially flagrant, one also cannot ignore the gutting (and extreme politicization) of the civil service, the use of extortion to dominate various previously independent institutions (universities, law firms, media companies), the carte blanche given to fraud and corruption (with crypto an especially flagrant example of both), and the utter debasement of the "rule of law."

    There are also a whole raft of economic issues, which only start with fraud and corruption, but mostly stem from a shift of effective power toward corporations and their financier owners, increasing inequality and further entrenching oligarchy. The emerging Trump economy is not less efficient and less productive, it is increasingly unfair and unjust, and much fuller of precarity, which will sooner or later cause resentment and provoke resistance, sabotage, and possibly even revolution. Inequality is not just unfair. It is an acid which dissolves trust, faith, and good will, leaving only force as a means of preserving order. Sure, Trump seems cool with that, as well as the Hobbesian hell of "war of all against all," figuring his side has a big edge in guns, and maybe God on his side. But nearly everything we do in the world depends on trust that other people are going to be respectful, civil, orderly. It's hard to imagine coping in a world where our ability to trust the government, other institutions, and other people has decayed, stranding us in a savage jungle of predators.

    You might be wondering why I haven't mentioned climate change yet. I've long described failure to act on it as an opportunity cost — a choice due to political decisions to prioritize other things (like war), but so many opportunities have been squandered that one suspects more malign (or at least ignorant) interests. Although one cannot doubt human responsibility, it is effectively a force of nature now, beyond political agendas, so the more urgent concern is how does government copes with inevitable disasters. With Trump, no surprise that the answer is badly — even worse than under Biden — and not just in response but in preparation, even to the ability to recognize a disaster when one occurs.

    Climate change may well be the factor that destroys Trump: he can't keep it from happening, he has no empathy for victims when it does, he lacks the ways and means to respond adequately, and having denied it at every step along the way, he has no credibility when his incompetence and/or malice is exposed. It undermines his very concept of government, which crudely stated is as a protection racket, as the people who normally pay him for favors will soon find they are anything but protected. Sure, lots of poor people will be hurt by climate change, but the rich can take little comfort in that, because they own the property that will be devalued and in some cases destroyed — and even if it doesn't hit them directly, the insurance spikes will do the trick. Businesses and lenders will go under because they can't bear the risks, and no amount of blame-shifting Fox propaganda is going to cover that up.

    I could say similar things about AI, automation, and other technological advancements, but the issues there are more complex. Suffice it to say that Trump's let-the-market-and/or-China-decide stance (depending on who chips in the most) won't work. There is much more I could mention. Civil rights enforcement is dead. Does that mean old-fashioned racism will rebound? Antitrust enforcement is dead (provided you bribe the right people, as Paramount just did). Federal grants for arts and sciences are pretty much dead. So is any chance of student loan relief. There is very little but your own scruples to keep you from cheating on your taxes, and who has those these days? Want to talk about pollution? Measles? We're not even very far down the list.

    And the kicker is, instead of having all this ridiculous stuff to complain about, we're really in a position to do some extraordinarily good things for practically everyone on the planet. What's holding us back is a lot of really bad thinking. And it's not just Trump and his toady Republicans and their rabid fanbase, although they're easily the worst. I spend a lot of time reading Democrats on strategy, agenda, media, etc., and they still fall way short of what is needed, due to lack of understanding and/or will power. I'd like to think that they at least are capable of empathy, understand the concepts of civil rights and a government that serves all people, and are at least open to reason, but all too often they leave you in doubt.

    By the way, only later did I notice that none of Walsh's stories implicate Trump. He gets a glancing mention in the debt story, as Gaza does with hunger, but he's effectively saying that everything else involving Trump is even less important than Epstein. I limited my alternate to Clinton stories, because they were easier to weigh against Foster. There were other big stories of Clinton's first half-term, like the dissolving of the Soviet Union, the founding of the European Union, the Oslo Accords, and even the Hubble Telescope, but I tried to keep my head in the game. Walsh seems to be hoping for another game entirely: one where we can pretend Trump doesn't matter.

    [*] There are lots of ways to debunk this. See John Quiggin [07-22] The Arguments for More (or Fewer) People, including many valid comments. One of this cites a book — Adam Becker: More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity — as "required reading for understanding where these people are coming from and why they are all completely insane."

Israel/Palestine: The atrocities hardly need me keeping track. What interests me more is how and when people see them, and realize that something else has to be done.

  • David Wallace-Wells [06-25] The Judgment of History Won't Save Gaza. No, but denying where Gaza fits in the long history of mass killing won't excuse Israel either. That the notion that "being on the right side of history" should be a motivation for good behavior may seem quaint in a culture that celebrates Breaking Bad, but in most times, most people have preferred to think of themselves as decent and virtuous. That such sentiments are scorned in today's Israel and America is not something to brag about. But even in a basically apologetic piece, here's a quote on what Israel has actually done:

    Reporting from the United Nations shows that today, nearly every hospital in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed, as have most schools and mosques. According to the United Nations Satellite Center, in less than two years, nearly 70 percent of all structures in Gaza have been possibly, moderately or severely damaged — or destroyed. As of January, U.N. figures showed nine in 10 homes were damaged or destroyed. About 90 percent of the population has been displaced, with many Gazans multiple times. A study published in January by The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, suggested that nearly 65,000 Palestinians had been killed by traumatic injury in the first nine months of the war — a figure 40 percent higher even than the estimates suggested by the Gaza Ministry of Health. The study also estimated that more than half of the dead were women and children; some estimates of the share of civilian casualties run higher. More than 175 Palestinian journalists have been killed.

    Those figures have been disputed, by Israel and many of its supporters, as has the degree to which this war has killed proportionally more civilians than many of the most gruesome military offensives of recent memory (Falluja, Mosul). But as you read about the recent targeted strikes on Iran, which according to the Israeli military killed a number of senior military and nuclear leaders, it's worth reflecting on reporting by +972 magazine, from earlier in the Gaza conflict, that for every low-level combatant that Israel's military A.I. targeted, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians in a strike — and that, in at least several instances, for higher-ranking figures, as many as 100 or more civilian deaths were tolerated. (Last April, I wrote about +972's reporting, much of which was later corroborated by The Times.)

    In recent weeks, the most horrifying news from Gaza has been about the attacks on those lining up for desperately needed humanitarian aid. Earlier in the conflict, it was especially striking to watch Cindy McCain — the head of the World Food Program and the widow of Senator John McCain, so much a stalwart supporter of Israel that his laughing face has been used in memes about the recent strikes in Iran — raise the alarm about the critical levels of hunger throughout Gaza. In May, she warned of famine — as she had been, on and off, for about a year. After that alarm-raising, a new food-distribution system was soon established. According to the U.N. human rights office, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since then, while waiting for food.

  • Peter Beinart [06-30] A New Playbook for Democratic Critics of Israel: "Zohran Mamdani's primary victory shows pro-Palestine candidates how to win without abandoning their values."

  • Muhannad Ayyash [07-13] Calling for world to account for the Gaza genocide: Review of Haidar Eid: Banging on the Walls of the Tank, which "reveals a disturbing but irrefutable reality: the world has abandoned the Palestinian people to be annihilated as a people in the most calculated and brutal fashion possible."

  • Bret Stephens [07-22] No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza: While the New York Times is legendary for their supplicant bias towards Israel, none of their columnists have more militantly cheered on the complete and utter devastation of Gaza than Stephens has. The only surprise here is that he doesn't come right out and embrace the genocide charge, but evidently whoever pulls his strings urged him to be a bit more circumspect. (Although his main argument that Israel isn't committing genocide is his brag that if Israel wanted to do so, they would have killed a lot more than 60,000 Palestinians.) Obviously, there's no point arguing with someone like him. Henceforth, we should just make sure to identify him always as "Holocaust Denier Bret Stephens."

  • Alice Speri [07-22] Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication.

  • Jason Ditz:

  • Aaron Maté [07-27] As Gaza starves, Trump tells Israel to 'finish the job': "The Trump administration abandons ceasefire talks just as aid groups warn of 'mass starvation' in Gaza, and Israeli officials admit to yet another murderous lie."

  • James North:

  • Aaron Boxerman [07-28] In a First, Leading Israeli Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Gaza Genocide: Notably, B'Tselem finally opens its eyes.

  • Malak Hijazi [07-29] Don't stop talking about the famine in Gaza: "Israel wants you to believe that airdrops and symbolic aid trucks will solve the famine in Gaza. Don't believe them. These measures are not meant to end hunger, only to quell growing global outrage as the genocide continues unchecked."

  • Branko Marcetic [07-29]: How much is shoddy, pro-Israel journalism worth? Ask Bari Weiss. "As her Free Press is poised to seal a $200 million deal with the mainstream news giant CBS, let us reflect on why."

  • Katrina Vanden Heuvel [07-29] A New Report Exposes How Major American Corporations Have Been All Too Eager to Aid Israel's Atrocities in Gaza: "It also reveals our nation's now undeniable complicity in what has been described as the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century."

  • Qassam Muaddi

    • [07-31]: As Gaza starvation shocks the world, Witkoff is in Israel to push for a ceasefire deal. Really? Just a day before, Muaddi wrote US pulls out of Gaza ceasefire talks, and nothing here really contradicts that. We should be clear here that while it's possible for Israel to negotiate with Hamas for release of the few hostages who have managed to survive the bombardment (and Israel's own Hannibal Directive), a ceasefire is something Israel can (and should) implement unilaterally. If Trump wanted a ceasefire, all he has to do is convince Netanyahu to stop the shooting and bombing. And if he has any trouble, he can halt Israel's supply of bullets and bombs. That he hasn't done this so far strongly suggests that he doesn't want to, possibly because he's a monster, or because he has no will in the matter. Once you have a ceasefire, there are other things that need to be negotiated. My preference would be for Israel to renounce its claim to Gaza and kick it back to the UN, which would have to then deal with the Palestinians, with aid donors, the US, etc. My guess is that once Israel is out of the picture, the UN would have no problem getting Hamas to release the hostages and to disband and disarm. Israel could claim their victory, and would be left with defensible borders. (This would, of course, leave Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territory, and in external refugee camps, with their own serious issues, but they're less pressing than ending the slaughter and starvation in Gaza.)

    • [08-13]: Starvation chronicles in Gaza: "I'm mostly tired of expecting the world to end this. I need to sleep. I have to wake up early to go look for food."

    • [08-14]: Israel swings between plans to occupy Gaza and resuming ceasefire talks: "As the Israeli army announced it was preparing plans for the occupation of Gaza City, initial reports indicate the ceasefire negotiations may resume, leaving open the question of whether Netanyahu's occupation plan is a negotiating tactic." Or (more likely) the negotiation rumors just another feint?

  • Michael Arria:

  • Philip Weiss [08-01]: Israel's international isolation has begun: "US and global politics surrounding Israel are shifting rapidly as the world recoils in horror at Israel's starvation of Gaza."

  • Jack Hunter [08-01]: How MTG became MAGA's moral compass on Gaza: "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has bucked her president, called for yanking aid to Israel, and was the first Republican to call what is happening 'a genocide'." By the way, I'm getting the impression that Responsible Statecraft is increasingly betraying its Koch roots and leaning right. Hunter is merely the writer most desperate to tout MAGA Republicans (including Trump) as peace icons.

  • Stavroula Pabst [08-01] Admin asked if US approves Gaza annex plan, says go ask Israel: More evidence of who's calling the shots for Trump foreign policy.

  • Mitchell Plithnick [08-01] Interview with Prof. Joel Beinin: No transcript, but I listened to all 1:09:31 of this. One side comment here was Beinin's note that the Jewish population had collapsed following the destruction of the 2nd temple (AD 70), with only a small minority adopting the new Rabbinic Judaism, which defined Judaism up to now. The implication is that as Jews turn against Israel, most will simply cease to identify as Jewish, while some will attempt to come up with a redefinition of Judaism that frees itself from Israel. I haven't found anything he's written on this, except complaints from some Zionist sources about his interpretation of Jewish history.

  • Francesca Fiorentini [08-01]: The 7 Worst Plans for Gaza: Don't bother. The article is a joke piece, and not a funny one. Besides, we already know the worst plan, which is for Israel to continue doing what it's done for 650+ days now, until they finally admit that all the Palestinians have died, just to spite Israel, who tried so hard to keep a few alive for decades, because war was the only way of life Israelis ever knew.

  • Aaron Boxerman/Samuel Granados/Bora Erden/Elena Shao [08-01] How Did Hunger Get So Much Worse in Gaza? Maybe because the aid trucks are used as bait for snipers? But that's just worse compared to what? Way before 2023, Israelis were restricting food imports to Gaza — their euphemism was "putting Gazans on a diet."

  • Mehdi Hasan [08-02]: The US is complicit in genocide. Let's stop pretending otherwise. I'm skeptical that "the US government, enabled by the media, is an active participant in Israel's atrocities in Gaza." Complicit? For sure. One could probably go further and argue that Israel could not, and therefore would not, be able to commit genocide, at least in this manner, without US material and diplomatic support, which under both Biden and Trump has been uncritical and unflinching, sometimes even beyond what was asked for. I also think the US has a deeper responsibility for Israel's turn toward genocide, even if much of the ideological underpinnings was imported from Israel, starting with the neocon embrace of Israel's far-right anti-Oslo opposition in the 1990s. (The Project for a New American Century started with a position paper on Israel's "defense of the realm.") But it's hard to be a participant in a reality you're so dedicated to pretending isn't real. I think it's probable that most Americans who still side with Israel are merely misinformed and/or deluded, and not fully in line with genocide. However, such negligence is hard to excuse for people who have a public responsibility to know what Israel is doing, and to implement US policy according to our own best interests. Hasan isn't wrong to include them among the "participants," even though their actual role is often passive and banal — words that have previous uses in describing people who not just tolerated but facilitated holocausts.

  • Aviva Chomsky [08-03] On Creating a Cover for Genocide: "Preventing criticism of Israel by defining it as antisemitic."

  • Julie Hollar [08-04]: Mainstream media largely sidelined starvation story, until it couldn't: "A deep dive into coverage shows a shocking lack of interest until now, and even then the reporting is skewed away from culpability."

  • Richard Silverstein:

  • Nathan J Robinson [08-05]: Why Won't US Politicians Say "Genocide"? Starts with a long list (with links) of organizations that have.

  • Max Boot [08-05] I still love Israel. But what I'm seeing is wrong. "It's still possible to love the country and condemn this war. But it's getting difficult." Original title (per Jeffrey St Clair, who added "imagine what it takes to finally turn Max Boot's war-mongering stomach") was "I hate the war in Gaza. But I still love Israel." I don't mind when people say they love Israel, as long as they understand that ending the war is the only way Israel can save itself.

  • Tareq S Hajjaj [08-07] Israel claims it's allowing aid into Gaza, but its 'engineering of chaos' ensures the aid doesn't reach starving Palestinians: "As limited aid trickles into Gaza, Israel's strategy of 'engineering chaos' by shooting at aid-seekers and permitting looters to steal aid ensures that food doesn't get to starving Palestinians."

  • Qassam Muaddi [08-07] Leaked Cabinet transcript reveals Israel chose to starve Gaza as a strategy of war: "Netanyahu chose to blow up the ceasefire and starve Gaza's population in order to force a surrender from Hamas, while top military and security officials favored moving to the second phase of a ceasefire, leaked cabinet meeting minutes reveal."

  • Abdaljawad Omar [08-08] The war without end in Gaza: "Israel's latest plan to occupy Gaza City reveals that the assault on Gaza is more than just a war over territory. It is a war to extend, and dictate the tempo of killing and destruction — to exhaust Gaza into submission." My main quibble here is that "submission" implies survival. Israel wants Gaza to be depopulated, either by death or by exile, and they don't care which (although as Deir Yassin in 1948 showed, they've long understood that mass murder is effective at driving exile).

  • Jonathan Ofir [08-08] 4 out of 5 Jewish Israelis are not troubled by the famine in Gaza: 79%.

  • Asaf Yakir [08-13] How War Became Israel's New Normal: "It is a mistake to think that Benjamin Netanyahu is solely responsible for Israel's genocide or that removing him would bring it to an end. To win support for war, he has mobilized large swathes of Israeli society, from liberals to the far right."

  • Ali Ghanim [08-12] Anas al-Sharif Was My Friend. Here's Why Israel Feared Him So Much. "On Monday, Anas, 28, was targeted, along with three other Al Jazeera journalists, in an Israeli strike on a tent complex around Al-Shifa Hospital."

  • Elfadil Ibrahim [08-14] Why Egypt can't criticize Israel for at least another two decades: "A record gas deal exposes a strategic vulnerability as Cairo trades political autonomy for energy security."

  • Martin Shaw [08-16]: When Genocide Denial Is the Norm: "Genocide scholar Martin Shaw argues that ending Israel's genocide in Gaza and isolating Israel on the international stage must become the cause of every country that claims to represent human values."

  • Angel Leonardo Peña [08-16] How Zionism is leading the reactionary wave worldwide: "Zionism is no longer hiding in the shadows, as it once did, supporting global reactionaries with training and support. It has now taken center stage as the vanguard of the global right, and all reactionaries are following." Back in the 1930s, one thing nearly all fascists had in common was anti-semitism. Today the nearly universal common thread is their embrace of Israel, especially as genocide becomes more obvious. The argument that criticism of Israel is proof of antisemitism is not just wrong; the opposite is much closer to the truth.

  • Tony Karon [08-17]: Anti-Semitism, Zionism and "the Americanization of the Holocaust: Much to recommend here, including this quote from Hagai El-Ad:

    We're approaching the moment, and perhaps it's already here, when the memory of the Holocaust won't stop the world from seeing Israel as it is. The moment when the historic crimes committed against our people will stop serving as our Iron Dome, protecting us from being held to account for crimes we are committing in the present against the nation with which we share the historical homeland.

Russia/Ukraine: During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to end this war "in a day." Of course, he had neither the diplomatic skills nor the inclination to actually do that — and he spent his day on other priorities, like pardoning his insurrectionists and organizing his gestapo — but even observers as skeptical as me of his peace credentials and foreign policy aims thought he'd be more likely to end the war than Biden's neocons, who saw the war as nothing more or less than an opportunity to bleed a hated foe dry. Granted, the terms would be less than ideal, but at this point ending the war on any terms is preferable to slogging on "to the last dead Ukrainian" (which seemed to be the Biden/Zelensky policy). I've never bought the line that Trump is Putin's stooge. Still, Putin holds most of the cards here, and it's been clear for some time that the war would only be settled on his terms. That Trump couldn't move faster was partly due to his own incompetence, but also because Putin decided to press his advantages: to gain more ground, while Trump made plain his disinterest in supporting Ukraine (not that he had reservations about allowing Europe to buy American arms to fight Russia).

The first stories below, from Aug. 1, reflect the moment Trump turned hawkish on Ukraine. Less than two weeks later, there seems to be a deal float, starting with a face-to-face meeting. There is not a lot of reason to expect this to pan out. (The meetings with Kim Jong-Un went nowhere, but mostly because Trump's security cabal was run by deep state saboteurs like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. No doubt similar people are still around, but buried deeper in the bureaucracy.) Whether this one does is almost totally up to Putin. If he can get most of Russian-speaking Ukraine and relief from most sanctions, he should be happy to let the rest of Ukraine go their own way. It's hard to see what more he could demand with any chance of agreement, and the downside is he pushes most of Europe into being even more aggressively anti-Russian than the US has been under Biden. Plus he gets a chance to make Trump look good — not something Trump can readily do on his own.

The last stories immediately follow the Trump-Putin summit on August 16, during which nothing was concluded, as the next step will be for Trump to meet with Zelensky.

  • Eli Stokols/Paul McLeary [08-01] Trump, escalating war of words with Russia's Medvedev, mobilizes two nuclear submarines.

  • Anatol Lieven [08-01] Trump vs. Medvedev: When talking tough is plain turkey: "Exchanging nuclear threats like this is pure theater and we should not be applauding." The war of words started over Trump's threats to impose sanctions if Russia doesn't comply with a ceasefire in 10 days." This led to Trump publicly positioning nuclear submarines to illustrate his threat to Russia, in a rare attempt at nuclear blackmail. Lieven argues that "Medvedev and Trump are both trying to look tough for domestic audiences." I doubt that either people much cares, but the leaders' personal machismo is on the line. What is truly disturbing about the Trump position is that the one thing Putin is least likely to accept is an ultimatum that would expose him as weak. On the other hand, rejection would make Trump look weak, so he's walked into his own trap.

  • Tyler Pager/David E Sanger [08-08]: Trump Says He Will Meet With Putin in Alaska Next Week: "Trump also suggested that a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine would include 'some swapping of territories,' signaling that the US may join Russia in trying to compel Ukraine to cede land."

  • Stavroula Pabst:

  • Anatol Lieven [08-09] Trump's terms for Russia-Ukraine on the right course for peace: "A meeting in Alaska, while putting land concessions on the table, is an essential first step." I've separated this from his earlier piece, because events intervened. Holding out any degree of hope viz. Trump strikes me as foolish, which is why I say it all comes down to Putin. But if Putin really did want to make Trump look good, why wait until now?

  • Norman Solomon [08-09] Democrats should give peace a chance in Ukraine: Democrats need to align with peace and social justice movements everywhere, pushing diplomatic solutions to conflicts that also recognize and advance human rights, regardless of power politics, narrow economic concerns, and the arms lobbies. But they need to prioritize peace, which is something the Biden administration failed to recognize — and which tragically cost them the 2024 election. The one advantage they have over Republicans is that they lean, at least in principle, toward social justice. Unfortunately, US foreign policy, under Democrats as well as Republicans, has reduced such views to hypocrisy, which has done immense damage to their reputation — both around the world and among their own voters.

  • Michael Corbin [08-12] Trouble in Russian economy means Putin really needs Alaska talks too: "Mixed indicators signal wartime growth has plateaued." I haven't really sorted this out. I don't think that economic considerations is going to dictate Putin's policy, but they must be somewhere in the back of his mind.

  • Harrison Berger [08-14] Stephen Cohen's legacy: Warnings unheeded, a war without end: "At his own peril, the late historian used his considerable influence to challenge rather than echo establishment narratives about Russia and Ukraine."

  • Zachary Paikin [08-14]: On Ukraine war, Euro leaders begin to make concessions — to reality: "The spirit going into Alaska will continue to be cautiously optimistic, as long as the parties with most at risk don't get in their own way."

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [08-15]: Deal or no deal? Alaska summit ends with vague hints at something: "There was no ceasefire, but none of the new sanctions Trump threatened, either. Whether this was a 'win' or 'loss' depends on who you ask." Why ask us? We're only "experts"! A lot of people were quick to pick on Trump for failing to bring home a peace deal, but that assumes he has a lot more power than he actually has. The main power that the US has is to underwrite the indefinite extension of the war, as Biden did from 2022 on. One side can get a war going and keep it going. But making peace requires some agreement from both sides, where one side is unambiguously Putin. So all Trump could hope for was for Putin to give him something he could take back to his side, which minimally includes Zelensky, NATO, and the EU. Whether what he brought back works depends on how good an offer Putin made, but that he brought it back signals that he's abandoned Biden's "fight to the last dead Ukrainian" plot. Now we have to see whether the "allies" were just going along with Washington, or have red lines of their own.

  • Adam Pasick [08-17]: What to Know About Russia-US-Ukraine Peace Talks: Actually, there doesn't seem to be much to know here. Trump got his marching orders from Putin in Alaska. He now has to face Zelensky and other European leaders (including NATO and EU's über-hawk Von Der Leyen) in Washington. If they buckle, and given the loss of US support bankrolling the forever war they might, then presumably there will in short course be an agreement that will cede the Russian-speaking Ukrainian territories (Crimea, Luhansk, and Donbas) to Russia, and leave the Ukrainian-speaking parts of Ukraine free and independent, with both sides agreeing not to fight any further. That's basically what could have happened in 2014, when a pro-western faction seized control of the Kiev government, and Crimea and Donbas revolted and declared their independence. Something like that happened peacefully with the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. It's never been clear why something along those lines didn't happen in Ukraine, but many nationalists — including, obviously, some Russian ones, but they are far from alone — are attached to their territorial ambitions, plus there was the underlying geostrategic interest of the US in advancing NATO at Russia's expense.

    The 2014-22 war was basically one waged by Ukraine to reconquer lost territory, even though there is little reason to think that the people living there preferred Kiev over Moscow. Putin sought to reverse that war by invading in 2022, which allowed Russia to gain some extra territory in the south, establishing a land bridge between Donbas and Crimea, mostly because Ukrainian forces were preoccupied with defending Kiev and Kharkhiv in the north. Ukraine reversed some of their losses late in 2022, but their 2023 counteroffensive failed, and the war has largely been stalemated ever since, with some minor Russian gains in Donetsk recently.

    Since the Russian offensive failed in 2022, it's been clear that Russia would not be able to overturn the Kiev government, let alone occupy western Ukraine. It's also been clear that Ukraine would not be able to dislodge Russian forces from territory that favors Russia, and that Russia has much greater depth which would allow it to wage the war much longer than Ukraine could. That Ukraine has been able to fight on as long and hard as it has is largely due to American and European support, which is waning. It is also clear that the impact of sanctions against Russia has not dimmed their will to continue the war. The idea that Russians would turn against Putin also appears fanciful. However much one may dislike the idea of allowing any nation to conquer part of any other, there is no practical alternative to a peace which largely vindicates Putin's decision to invade. The US under Biden refused to consider any concessions, which allowed (encouraged?) Zelensky to take a maximalist stand. Trump, on the other hand, seems inclined to respect Putin's needs. His problem is squaring them away with the minimal needs of Ukraine and their European partners.

    Whether he can, I suspect, will depend more on how reasonable a deal Putin is willing to offer than on Trump's hitherto clueless "art of the deal." However much Russia resented NATO, the fact that America was always in charge used to moderate the risk NATO posed to Russia. If Putin doesn't offer something Ukraine/Europe can live with, they're liable to break with Trump and continue the fight on their own. A Europe provoked to break with the US could become much more of a threat to Russia than NATO ever was (not an existential threat, in that Europe will never conquer and occupy Russia, but it could be more effective at isolating and shunning Russia).

    I'm not bothered by Putin's insistence on no ceasefire. While my approach would be to start with a ceasefire, Putin is wary that offering one first would allow Ukraine to drag out future negotiations (much like the US has never come to terms with North Korea, 72 years after that ceasefire). While any killing that occurs between now and whenever is unnecessary and probably meaningless, it is more important to get to a proper peace deal sooner rather than later. And while Putin is an intensely malign political figure, it is better for all concerned to establish some sort of civil relationship with Russia post-bellum — as opposed to America's usual grudge-holding (again, see North Korea, also Iran, and for that matter Afghanistan).

    Personally, I would have liked to see this worked out better, but no one involved cares what I think. They're going to operate according to their own craven impulses. But I wouldn't worry too much about the details, as long as we get to some kind of peace. Justice is a much taller order, but better to pursue it in peace than in war.

    The NY Times has more on Ukraine here, where the latest title is "Trump Backs Plan to Cede Land for Peace in Ukraine."

  • Anatol Lieven [08-17]: Why Trump gets it right on Ukraine peace: "In Alaska he found reality: he is now embracing an agreement without demanding a ceasefire first, which would have never worked anyway." I wrote the above before getting to this piece. Nothing here changes my mind on anything. Lieven is right to point out that "Trump is engaged in a form of shuttle diplomacy." He needs to get both sides to agree, but he only has leverage over one side, so he only gets the deal that Putin will allow, and that only if Putin allows a deal that Zelensky can accept. He's gambling that both are agreeable, in which case he hopes to snag a Nobel Peace Prize before he blunders into WWIII. That at least is a motivation one can imagine him considering. Anything else is laughable: e.g., Lieven's line that "We should at least give [Trump] credit for moral courage." Also hilarious is "Putin is hardly the 'global pariah' of Western political and media rhetoric." It's almost like Lieven thinks he's such a big shot pundit he imagines that his flattery might sway Putin and Trump to do the right thing. Rest assured that even if they do, it won't be for the right reasons. And neither will admit that it was someone else's idea.

Trump administration: Practically every day, certainly several times every week, I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump administration. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything.

Current Affairs:

  • [08-06] Our 200th News Briefing! I signed up for the free peak at this when it originally came out, but they soon moved it off Substack, and it doesn't normally seem to be available on their website, so I lost track of it. (I'm still signed up for something on Substack, which mostly seems to be funding appeals.) Still, as a tribute to round numbers, this sample is available. Some interesting stuff here, but nothing I'd pay money for.

  • Andrew Ancheta [05-21] Why You Should Fix Your Own Stuff: "Companies like Apple and Microsoft don't want you to repair your own tech, because they make a fortune from planned obsolescence. But learning to do it yourself brings empowerment." Few things bother me more than business schemes to make their products independently repairable. The right-to-repair bills mentioned here would help, but we need to go further, and make all software and hardware open source and interoperable. And while I can personally attest that being able to repair your own stuff feels good, there is so much stuff that's so complicated that no one can understand how to repair it all. I'd like to start thinking about repair cooperatives, and publicly funding them.

  • Nathan J Robinson

    • [07-24] Rise of the Idiot Interviewer: "Podcast bros are interviewing presidents and power players without doing basic research beforehand. The result is a propagandistic catastrophe."

    • [07-30] Living in Omelas: "When we face the suffering that our civilization is built on, what are our obligations?" Starts with a Ursula Le Guin story, but eventually circles back to Gaza.

    • [2024-10-01] Surely AI Safety Legislation Is A No-Brainer: "Radical Silicon Valley libertarianism is forcing us all to take on unnecessary risks, and the new technology is badly in need of regulation." Not a new piece, but new to me. I've done essentially nothing with AI so far, but probably should start working with it. I'm already finding Google's searches to be significantly improved with it (and not just because the web page links are almost exclusively commercial crap). But I have no idea how you go about regulating it to ensure any degree of safety. What I am fairly sure of is that the profit motive ensures that it will be used for purposes ranging dubious to nefarious, so one was to reduce risk would be to cut back on profit motives.[*] However, it is very hard to regulate industries without their cooperation — indeed, the main force for license requirements is the desire to limit competition — because our political system is designed so that special interests compete, while the general interest has no lobby.[**] So I wouldn't be surprised to find most of the push to regulate coming from the companies themselves, not so much to protect users as to validate their own business models.

      [*] One simple way to do this would be to declare and nothing developed with AI can be patented or copyrighted. You could go a step further and declare that nothing that can be reverse-engineered with AI is eligible. The arguments for doing this are pretty obvious. Needless to say, we're not going to see a lot of lobbying to limit patents and copyrights, although the AI companies will probably lobby for laws to limit their exposure for whatever harm AI may cause. We'll hear that without limitation of liability, the industry will be stifled, which means they won't be able to make as much money, or be as careless in making it.

      • [**] By the way, I have a solution for this: tax lobbying expenses at 100%, so that in order to spend $1 on lobbying, you also have to donate $1 to a public fund for counter-lobbying. That way every side of every issue gets equal weighting, so winners will be determined on their merits. Same thing can apply to political donations. It would take some work to set up a fair and effective distribution system, but I have a bunch of ideas for that, too.

  • Grady Martin [07-29] The "Careless People" Who Make Up Elite Institutions: "Sarah Wynn-Williams' bestseller is a disturbing exposé about the inner workings of Facebook. But Wynn-Williams herself is complicit in the harms she criticizes, and so is her entire class of elite strivers."

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

Laura Snapes [2024-09-30] Farewell to the car CD player, source of weirdly deep musical fandoms. Some time after I bought my 1986 Audi, I replaced the radio with a CD player. Same with my 1994 Nissan, unless it came with one (I'm a bit unsure, but if it did, it was gone within a week). The 2006 Toyota had one by default, but we opted for the 6-CD changer. I don't think I ever loaded more than one CD at a time, but it came with extra speakers, and made a statement. When I started contemplating a new car just before 2020 happened, I was dismayed to find virtually nothing offering CD players, or even radios that could be ripped out and easily replaced. When we finally gave in and bought our new Toyota, all we could get was a 10.5-inch media/info console with bluetooth, wi-fi, one usb port, and a bunch of trial subscriptions. I spent our first week driving in silence, except when the wife insisted on NPR, which was painful.

Thomas Frank [2024-11-09] The Elites Had It Coming: Just stumbled across this, not recalling it but thinking, of course, this is what he would say the day after the election debacle. Turns out I did cite this piece in my post-election Speaking of Which, even pulling out a quote indicting Democrats as "their most brilliant minds couldn't figure [Trump] out." In rereading the piece, I'm more struck by the two paragraphs above the one I quoted:

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, put together a remarkable coalition of the disgruntled. He reached out to everyone with a beef, from Robert Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk. From free-speech guys to book banners. From Muslims in Michigan to anti-immigration zealots everywhere. "Trump will fix it," declared the signs they waved at his rallies, regardless of which "it" you had in mind.

Republicans spoke of Mr. Trump's persecution by liberal prosecutors, of how he was censored by Twitter, of the incredible strength he showed after being shot. He was an "American Bad Ass," in the words of Kid Rock. And clucking liberal pundits would sometimes respond to all this by mocking the very concept of grievance, as though discontent itself were the product of a diseased mind.

Elie Mystal [07-02] Democrats Should Become the Pro-Porn Party. I was surprised to see this, and welcome it, but don't hold out much hope. Democrats have long sought to portray themselves as exemplars of probity, even to the point of allowing themselves to be caricatured as elitist scolds, with the suggestion that they are really just virtue signalling hypocrites. Perhaps they're still reeling from the Cleveland-era charges of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion"? (Not far removed from their preference for blue over red, which can be linked back to McCarthyite-era red scares, something they felt vulnerable to because, like communists, they tended to at least pay lip service to the notions of equal rights and social justice. The purpose of red-baiting was not just to attack and isolate communists but also to tar the liberals, who when they ran scared discredited themselves, isolating themselves from their most principled and committed allies.)

Prohibition was at the heart of those charges, and so it remains: the belief that "improper" personal behavior can and should be repressed by those in power. While people with good intentions can be tempted by prohibitionism — the temperance movement being a prime example — its real constituency is on the right, because they are the ones who believe in power, which in hard and/or soft form is the only way they can maintain their unjust social and economic hierarchy. While they happily invent their own morality to suit their interests, it's even easier to ride on old religious prejudices, especially as they have a ready constituency, led by their own authoritarians. Moreover, labeling some people as deviants seems to make the others feel superior, and that is the definition of social hierarchies.

Democrats could oppose these right-wing schemes by defending every targeted group, but that lets the right set the framework for the debate, taints you, divides you, and dissipates energy with many isolated defenses. Much better to articulate a general principle, and show how prohibition and other prejudices spread to harm others, ultimately including the people who initially approved. To some extent Mystal does this, seeing porn as a free speech issue, and personal access to it as a question of privacy. Democrats mostly agree as far as law — Mystal cites a Kagan dissent against Alito & Thomas — but muddle their defense by trying to show their disapproval of acts, speech, and thoughts they would stop short of prohibiting. This fails on all counts: it reinforces the right-wing view that they're right and you're evil; it makes you look and sound guilty; it offers the targets of their hatred little reassurance that you'll defend their rights, or that you even care much about them. You'd be much better off making a strong defense of key rights, including free speech and privacy, then making it clear that their defense extends to things like porn, regardless of whether one personally approves or not.

Some Democrats have made some effort here (in terms of not just defending but showing some respect for targets of attack), at least on issues like abortion and even the T in LGBTQ, but drugs (beyond marijuana) and sex work still seem to be taboo. (Whether there's a political constituency to be gained there is hinted at but not much discussed. A lot of people enjoy porn, even if few will champion it in public.) A big problem here is that anti-porn forces try to shift the question to the question of children — conventionally under 18, which is several years past the point where people start taking an interest in sex and really should understand. I'd go further than Mystal and argue that all age restrictions on viewing porn should be abolished. (I could see where acting in porn might be a different concern, but there are lots of areas where I doubt the value of being so overly protective and controlling of adolescents — the matter of younger children is certainly less clear cut.) Still, porn seems to me like a relatively low-priority issue, unlikely to gain much traction, although more clearly articulated views of free speech and privacy might help, especially to counter the rampant bigotry of the right.

  • Elie Mystal [07-30] The Rule of Law Is Dead in the US: "The rule of law presupposes that there are rules that provide a consistent, repeatable, and knowable set of outcomes. That's no longer the case.".

Kevin Munger [07-14] Attention is All You Need: On the collapse of "literary culture," and social media as "secondary orality," followed by a primer on how AI works. Title collides with Chris Hayes' recent book on attention, so Munger recommends "best experienced through the medium of an Ezra Klein podcast, then also mentions "Derek Thompson's report on the end of reading, which leads to a joke about their recent book, Abundance.

Nate Chinen [07-15] The Times, A-Changin': Reports on a leaked "internal memo" of a shake-up in the New York Times arts coverage, where "veteran critics" Jon Pareles (pop music), Margaret Lyons (TV), Jesse Green (theater), and Zachary Woolfe (classical music) "will soon be taking on unspecified 'new roles,' while the paper searches for replacements on their beats." I was pointed to this by Piotr Orlov, who concluded "The whole episode simply reaffirms a basic Dada Strain [his blog] tenet: the need to organize and build our own institutions. (And maybe stop chasing the ever-more poisoned chalice.)" I've believed that much since the early 1970s, as soon as I ran into the notion of controlling the "means of production"; which is to say, even before I first encountered, and developed an immediate distaste for, the New York Times. Chinen's reaction is milder, perhaps a lingering effect of having tasted that poisoned chalice, tempered by personal familiarity. And, for now at least, the four still have jobs, and may come to find opportunities in writing less routine coverage, as well as behind-the-scenes influence. But the more disturbing aspect of Chinen's piece is the broader shift of media megacorps, which is really what the Times has become (the newspaper itself just a facade from an earlier era), to monetizing novel forms of attention grabbing, which increasingly substitute for critical thinking. As a non-reader (or a hostile one when I do glimpse something), I've long regarded the New York Times as some kind of black hole, where good writers cash in and become irrelevant, rarely if ever to be seen or heard again. Jon Pareles has long been a prime example: I remember him fondly from his 1970s reviews in Crawdaddy, notably for introducing me to musicians I had never heard of, like George Crumb and Dudu Pukwana. Many more have followed, willing cogs in their machine. Jon Caramanica, for instance: Chinen reports that he's given up "the word," finding a new calling making "popcast" videos. Sounds like a waste to me, but I guess they've figured out how to make money out of it, and for them, what else matters?

Bob Boilen [07-16] The end of public radio music?

Ryan Cooper [07-17] How Did Elon Musk Turn Grok Into MechaHitler? "The malfunctioning xAI chatbot provides some insights into how large language models work." For starters, it appears they haven't overcome the oldest maxim in computer science: "garbage in, garbage out."

Paul Krugman [07-22] Has Brazil Invented the Future of Money? "And will it ever come to America?" I'm not familiar with this concept, but it's long been obvious to me that we could save a huge amount of money if we set up a public non-profit utility to handle payments.

Last week the House passed the GENIUS Act, which will boost the growth of stablecoins, thereby paving the way for future scams and financial crises. On Thursday the House also passed a bill that would bar the Federal Reserve from creating a central bank digital currency (CBDC), or even studying the idea.

Why are Republicans so terrified by the idea of a CBDC that they're literally ordering the Fed to stop even thinking about it?

I'd go much farther and wipe out much of the existing banking industry, which is predatory and counterproductive. It's unclear to me that there is anything worthwhile that banks can do more efficiently and/or productively than a public service utility. Given that government can borrow less expensively than private banks — especially if you overlook the favorable terms banks receive from government — this can extend to most routine loans. Everyone could be provided not just a free checking and savings account, but a credit card. (Note that many other forms of loans, like mortgages and student loans, are already backed by government, so would cost less to administer directly.)

As Krugman notes, the finance industry has a lot of lobbying clout in America, and this is directed at preventing consideration of alternatives. (Same for the better known but actually smaller health care and oil industries.) So we are, at least for now, screwed, repeatedly. Inequality is effectively a measure of the political power that elites have to concentrate surplus value in their own hands. Other nations, like Brazil, don't have to get sucked into this trap, and as such, especially as the rot of the so-called Washington Consensus becomes more obvious, can offer us laboratories for alternative approaches.

I've read Krugman regularly for many years, but I didn't follow his move to Substack. Looking at the website, these are a few posts that caught my eye (although some are cut short, so there's some kind of shakedown involved):

  • [04-03]: Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy? "Trump's tariffs are a disaster. His policy is worse." The basic analysis is solid. The suggestion that the methodology could have been cooked up by AI is amusing. The top comment by George Santangelo is worth quoting:

    Tariffs aren't imposed by Trump for economic reasons. Trump has found the ultimate grift. Put tariffs on everything and wait for the requests to remove them, industry by industry, company by company. In return, Trump or his family or his pals receive money, business, information and any other advantage for the removals. Who will know whether a real estate development by Jared Kushner for the Saudis results in an advantageous price for the land and development fees for the Trump organization? It's the perfect corrupt plot. Any and all United States monies are subject to theft by the ultimate thief.

    I chopped off the "BTW" bit, relating to Trump's convictions and impeachment. The latter is an impossible reach, so it might be better to just admit that Trump — with his packing of the courts and personal takeover of the DOJ — is above and beyond the law, and make voters face the consequences of that. Along the way, just try to document the many ways (criminal or not) Trump and his cronies line their pockets from his administration's arbitrary and often irrational actions.

  • [07-16]: Trump's parade flopped. No Kings Day was a hit. "Right now, images largely determine the outcome."

  • [07-29]: I Coulda Made a Better Deal: "What, exactly, did Trump get from Europe?" His "better deal" was none at all.

  • [07-30]: Fossil Fool: "How Europe took Trump for a ride."

  • [07-31]: The Media Can't Handle the Absence of Truth: "And their diffidence empowers pathological liars." More on the gullibility of the media. Their assumption is that both sides have slightly tinted views of reality, allowing them to interpolate. But that breaks down when one side goes bonkers, and they lack the critical faculties to determine which. (Of course, they fare even worse when both sides are grossly wrong, as on Israel.)

  • [08-01]: Trump/Brazil: Delusions of Grandeur Go South: "Trump thinks he can rule the world, but he doesn't have the juice."

  • [08-03]: The Economics of Smoot-Hawley 2.0, Part I: "Tariffs will be very high as far as the eye can see. What does that mean?"

  • [08-05]: The Paranoid Style in American Economics: "Remember, every accusation is a confession." The subtitle is a truism that should be pointed out more often. The main thing I learned in my high school psych class was the concept of projection: how we ascribe to others our own sick motives and ambitions. Thus the US thinks China wants to rule the world. Thus Bush thought Saddam Hussein would nuke New York if we didn't prevent him from developing any form of nuclear deterrence. Thus a bunch of white idiots think that any loosening civil rights would turn blacks into slave masters. Most often when you accuse someone else of nefarious motives, you're admitting to your own.

  • Greg Sargent [07-30] Krugman Wrecks Trump's Europe Deal: "Scam on His Voters: An interview with Paul Krugman, who "explains at length why [Trump's trade agreement with Europe is] actually a big loss for our country — and especially for his MAGA base."

  • Krugman also has a series of papers on "Understanding Inequality" published by Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality:

    1. Why Did the Rich Pull Away From the Rest?
    2. The Importance of Worker Power
    3. A Trumpian Diversion
    4. Oligarchs and the Rise of Mega-Fortunes
    5. Predatory Financialization
    6. Crypto: This one is still paywalled, and despite the "Part VII" in the title may not be part of the series, but he offers it has a case study, "seen as a sort of hyper-powered example of predatory finance, influence-buying and corruption." Points listed: 1. The strange economics of cryptocurrency; 2. Crypto as a form of predatory finance; 3. How crypto drives inequality; 4. How the crypto industry has corrupted our politics.

Catherine Rampell [07-23] 11 tips for becoming a columnist: Washington Post opinion columnist, now ex, started writing about business for the New York Times, has done TV punditry at CNN and MSNBC. I've cited her 10 times in Speaking of Which, but my recall is vague.[*] This seems like generally wise advice, so I thought I'd check up on what else she's written in her last days:

  • [07-17] Democrats risk taking the wrong lessons from Trumpism: "Replicating Trump's populism is not the answer." Lead picture, and much of the article, is Zohran Mamdani, but she also mentions Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and "new convert" Chris Murphy, while exempting "more pragmatist, technocrat-driven" Democrats like Obama. But consider her definition:

    After all, that is the unifying theme of populism: Promise voters they would have a better life and nicer things if not for [insert scapegoats here]. Identifying a cabal to blame can help win elections, but it is not a great strategy for governing. . . . But the rhetoric from the populist left and right has some similarities: You would have nice things if not for the corrupt elites keeping them from you. . . . The common tendency to respond to complicated social problems with scapegoats, slogans and simple solutions explains why a populist everyman such as Joe Rogan can seemlessly transition from Feeling the Bern to jumping on the Trump Train.

    Several (well, many) things come to mind here. Identifying enemies is common to all effective politics. This is because most people need to personify the forces affecting them, rather than just blame abstractions (isms, groups, secret cabals, etc.). This only seems unusual because mainstream Democrats, desiring to be all things to all people, shy away from opposing anyone (or limit themselves to safe targets among the powerless — scapegoats, as you say). Left and right (and for that matter middle, in their own muddled way) share the trait of identifying enemies and promising benefits to others. But the differences in who they blame and what they promise are considerable, so why ignore that? Once you look, there are obvious differences between left and right. For starters, the left blames people who actually exercise substantial power, whereas the right blames phantoms and ascribes them with mythical power. (Ok, some of their targets are real, like unions, public interest groups, and honest Democrats, but few wield substantial power.) And the left tries to offer real solutions. The right may try to appeal to the same people and issues as the left, but they blame false villains, and offer ineffective solutions. So sure, they may be able to confuse some folk like Rogan, but note that Rogan only switched to Trump after Democrats excluded Sanders — although in Rogan's case, that Trump appeared on his program but Harris refused may have mattered more.

    One more point here: Rampell, like many recent left-adverse liberals, uses "populism" derisively, as a crude attempt to smear sincere leftists by associating them with right-wing demagogues. There are many problems with this[**], but the one I want to note here is that it betrays a distrust in the ability of most people to understand their own best interests and to govern themselves. The implication here is that we know better, and you should defer to our superior understanding — which is conditioned by their own economic interests and cultural values. It shouldn't be hard to understand why the anti-elitist impulses that most people hold might kick in here, especially given the track record of "pragmatic Democrats" like Clinton and Obama. There are lots of things one can say about Trump's demagoguery and how it exploits the worst impulses of popular opinion, but to call it "populist" implies that the fault lies in the people, and not in their manipulators. After all, what are anti-populist liberals but higher-minded manipulators?

    One more quote, which offers a good example of how cynically centrist-liberals distort leftist programs to arrive at nothing but a defense of the status quo:

    Rich people and corporations can definitely afford to pay higher taxes, as I have argued many times. But the reason we don't have Medicare-for-all (as designed by Sanders) is that Americans don't have the stomach for the middle-class taxes such a huge expansion of the safety net would require.

    Even if you seized the entire wealth of every billionaire in the country — i.e., impose a 100 percent wealth tax — that would pay for Medicare-for-all for just over a year. Forget free college or other Scandinavian-style welfare-state expansions that the fabled billionaire money tree is also earmarked for. But anyone who points out math problems like this, or suggests some less ambitious alternative, is tarred and feathered as a corporate shill or handmaiden to the oligarchs.

    I count about five major fallacies here, but we could split hairs and double that. One actually tilts in favor of her argument: a lot of the wealth counted by rich people is illusory, based on inflated values for assets, bid up by other rich people desperate for assets. So there are practical limits to how much wealth one can tax away. On the other hand, destroying all that imaginary value wouldn't be a bad thing. Moreover, whatever real value there is, is redistributed, mostly to people who can put it to better use. Moreover, even if you can't satisfy desired spending by only taxing the rich, that doesn't mean you shouldn't tax the rich. They're the obvious place to start, because they have most of the money, and they can afford it.

    New welfare services don't have to be fully funded out of new revenues. In many cases — health care being an obvious one — they directly replace current expenses. There's much more along these lines. For what it's worth, I think Democrats are hurting themselves in proposing to only raise taxes on the rich. There is certainly a lot of room to do so, and doing so would have some positive benefits beyond raising revenues that can be put to better ends, but to fix the worst problems of inequality, we also need to work on the rules and policies that create so much inequality. As that is done, the rich will have less money to tax away, so the mix of revenues, like the mix of wealth, should spread out. As long as income and estate taxes are strongly progressive, it shouldn't be a problem to set the overall tax level according to desired expenses and make up the funding with consumption taxes. Any service that can be done better and/or cheaper by a public utility is a good candidate for public funding, especially if metering it would be harmful. Those cases should be net savings for the whole nation, even if they appear as tax increases. We already do this in many cases, but it's easy to think of more that can be done better (e.g., banking).

    [*] Sample titles, which despite some both-sidesism suggests why an increasingly Trump-friendly WP might be disposed to get rid of her:

    • It's almost like the House GOP never care about deficits after all
    • A year after Dobbs, House GOP proposes taking food from hungry babies
    • Supposed 'moderates' like Nikki Haley would blow up the government
    • Efforts to kill Obamacare made it popular. Trump says he'll try again.
    • Trump can't find anyone to spot him $464 billion. Would you?
    • Two myths about Trump's civil fraud trial
    • The internet was supposed to make humanity smarter. It's failing
    • Those who would trade democracy for economic gain would get neither
    • Hot tip: Both parties should stop bribing voters with tax cuts [on exempting tip income]
    • Voters prefer Harris's agenda to Trump's — they just don't realize it. Take our quiz.

    [**] As a Kansan, I associate populism with the 1892-96 People's Party, a left-democratic movement that emerged in response to the ultra-conservative Grover Cleveland and the oligarchic takeover of the Republican Party. They were especially successful in Kansas, so I tend to view them as part of my political heritage (as does Thomas Frank; see especially his book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism; some reviews are still interesting, such as Aaron Lake Smith [Jacobin], and James Traub [NY Times], which also covers a Gene Sperling book that looks better than expected).

Will Hermes [07-23] Nick Drake, Long a Folk Mystery, Is (Partly) Revealed: "A 42-track collection built around two found recordings helps illuminate the creative process of the revered but elusive icon, who died in 1974."

Moira Donegan [07-26]: Columbia's capitulation to Trump begins a dark new era for US education: "The university's agreement reveals its willingness to bend to the administration's will and undermines an American myth." The agreement includes paying "a $220 million fine," and more:

The deal that resulted gives the Trump administration everything it wants. A Trump-approved monitor will now have the right to review Columbia's admissions records, with the express intent of enforcing a supreme court ban on affirmative action — in other words, ensuring that the university does not admit what the Trump administration deems to be too many non-white students. The Middle Eastern studies department is subject to monitoring, as well, after an agreement in March.

The agreement is not a broad-level, generally applicable regulatory endeavor that applies to other universities — although given the scope of the administration's ambitions at Columbia, it is hard to say whether such a regulatory regime would be legal. Instead, it is an individual, backroom deal, one that disregards the institution's first amendment rights and the congressionally mandated protections for its grants in order to proceed with a shakedown. "The agreement," writes the Columbia Law School professor David Pozen, "gives legal form to an extortion scheme." The process was something akin to a mob boss demanding protection money from a local business. "Nice research university you have here," the Trump administration seemed to say to Columbia. "Would be a shame if something were to happen to it."

That Columbia folded, and sacrificed its integrity, reputation and the freedom of its students and faculty for the federal money, speaks to both the astounding lack of foresight and principle by the university leadership as well as the Trump movement's successful foreclosure of institutions' options for resistance

Ben Schwartz [07-30] Jay Leno's Phony Case for Balanced Comedy: "The former Tonight Show host thinks a dose of bothsidesism will punch up the late-night scene."

David A Graham [07-31] The Warped Idealism of Trump's Trade Policy: "The president once promised he'd prioritize Americans' bottom line above all else. He's abandoned that pledge."

Paul Starr [07-31]: The Premature Guide to Post-Trump Reform: "American history offers three general strategies of repair and renewal." But has the need for reform ever been so acute? Or so fraught with obstacles based on entrenched pockets of power? He offers three "levels": The post-Watergate model; Changing the Supreme Court; Amending the Constitution.

Pankaj Mishra [08]: Speaking Reassurance to Power: Basically a long rant about the fickleness of the American intelligentsia, so eager to celebrate any note of freedom tolerable to the ruling class, and so reticent to break ranks when that same ruling class turns tyrannical and bloody.

Why 'King of the Hill' Is the Most Significant Work of Texas Culture of the Past Thirty Years. Cartoon series, ran from 1997-2009, gets a reboot, after Hank and Peggy spend their last years working in Saudi Arabia, and return to Texas retirement, finding their old world changed in oh so many ways — one being that their son, Bobby, has become a German-Japanese fusion chef. We've seen 4-5 episodes so far, and they bounce off in interesting directions. (My wife has probably seen the entire original run. I've only seen enough to get the general idea.)

Steve Kopack/Monica Alba/Laura Strickler [08-01] Trump fires labor statistics boss hours after the release of weak jobs report: "Without evidence, Trump called the data 'rigged' and implied that BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer manipulated the numbers 'for political purposes.'" Fake data is something that only Trump is entitled to, and everyone else must line up behind his lead. I rarely do this, but here's the actual Trump "truth":

Last week's Job's Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged. That's why, in both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats. Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!! I will pick an exceptional replacement. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAGA!

  • Haley Brown [08-08] They Shoot Messengers, Don't They?

  • Edward Helmore [08-02] Republicans slam Trump's firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics chief.

  • Chris Lehman [08-14] The Case Against EJ Antoni: Meet Trump's pick to destroy the BLS. Actually, he needs no introduction, as he's one of the few right-wing hacks so awful I recognized the name immediately. As Lehman puts it:

    But killing the messenger who brandishes bad economic news is only half the battle for the ambitious MAGA fateful; to really get things rolling, you need to promote a practiced bootlicker into the new policy void. And this is where central casting appears to have unearthed Antoni, who is basically the economics version of Chris Rufo—a mendacious talking head who will do virtually anything to distort the basic terms of inquiry in order to arrive at an ideologically predetermined outcome.

    Lehman digs up damning testimonials, even from conservative economists (Kyle Pomerleau at AEI: "He has either shown a complete misunderstanding of economic data and principles, or he's showing a willingness to treat his audience with contempt and mislead them"). Lehman also notes that BLS doesn't just send out press releases. Its statistics feed directly into the economic policy machinery, affecting millions of Americans through things like the COLA (cost of living adjustment) used to calculate Social Security benefits.

Dean Baker [08-01] Bringing Back Stagflation, Lower Growth, and Higher Prices: "When Trump talks of turning the economy around, he speaks the truth — he just gets the direction of change wrong." This does us the favor of sorting out and summing up the economic reports on Trump's first six months, and looks ahead, expecting growth to continue slowing and prices to continue rising, even though those factors are supposed to cancel each other out. Further deterioration in the trade balance was not supposed to be the result of tariffs, but here you go. (Tourists spending money in the US count as imports, and Trump's gestapo tactics are warning people away.) All this was before Trump's latest move to make the numbers more "politically correct." Whether future numbers can be believed is impossible to know, but many voters had no problem disbelieving Biden's relatively decent numbers. By the way, Baker's blog is always worth reading:

Ryan Cooper [08-01] COVID Contrarians Are Wrong About Sweden: "Trying to 'let it rip' in early 2020 was a disaster."

David Daley [08-01] How the GOP Hopes to Gerrymander Its Way to a Midterms Victory: "In a series of mid-decade redistricting gambits, state legislatures are looking to rig next year's congressional balloting in advance." We're basically in a race where Republicans are trying to lock down centers of power to make it near impossible for Democrats to regain power by merely winning elections. Daley has especially focused on the gerrymandering issue — his first book on the subject was Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy (2016), and his latest is Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections — but they've done much more, all stemming from their belief that government "of, by, and for the people" is an intolerable risk to their special interests.

Jeffrey St Clair, plus some more from Counterpunch:

  • [08-01] Roaming Charges: Something's Gone Wrong Again: First half on Israel, and does as good a job of summarizing the atrocities and factoring in American complicity as anything in that section. A brief section on famines around the world reminds me not to make light of Walsh's 2nd story, but that's because he doesn't sacrifice credibility by softballing Gaza, where "the risk of famine is total." He also notes a New York Times example I don't recall from North's articles (St Clair's highlight in bold):

    While Israel allows some food into Gaza, it has drastically reduced the number of places from which food is distributed, forcing Palestinians to receive food aid from a handful of sites that are hard to access. In a crude form of crowd control, Israeli soldiers have repeatedly shot and killed scores of Palestinians along routes leading to the new food distribution sites, forcing civilians to choose between the risk of gunfire and the risk of starvation.

    Isn't this not just the textbook definition of terrorism but an extraordinary, hitherto unexampled instance of it? While killing is an obvious metric of the war, pegging the number at 60,000 — about 3% of Gaza's population — risks underestimating the psychological impact. (Israel lost about 1% of its Jewish population in the 1947-49 War of Independence, which is generally remembered as a time of extraordinary trauma — by the way, about two-thirds of those were soldiers, so the civilian impact was much less, although still horrifying, I'm sure.) But death is just one of many metrics for Gaza: the most obvious being the 90% displaced, and at least that many malnourished. Figures like that are driving up the death rate — which I suspect is increasingly uncounted — but the much more widespread effect is psychological. We don't have a word for one army systematically trying to drive a whole country insane, because no one has ever done anything like that before, but that's a big part of what Israel is doing right now. And the chances that they don't fully comprehend what they're doing are almost inconceivably slim.

    As for the people who've just realized that Israel is committing genocide, St Clair cites an article by Raz Segal in Jewish Currents dated October 13, 2023: "A Textbook Case of Genocide: Israel has been explicit about what it's carrying out in Gaza. Why isn't the world listening?" That, by the way, was about the same date when I realized that Israel was not going to stop with a particularly draconian revenge tantrum but fully intended to, as more than a few of their fans put it at the time, "finish the job."

    Much more, as usual, seguing to ICE, the heat dome, fire season, pollution, and much more. This item is worth noting:

    Under Jair Bolsonaro, the proportion of Brazil's population suffering from food insecurity reached 23%. Today, 19 months into the 3rd Lula administration, the UN has announced this proportion has dropped below 2.5%. Brazil has been removed from the FAO UN World Hunger Map.

    Trump, by the way, is threatening Brazil with high tariffs unless they drop the prosecution of Bolsonaro and regulation of US social media companies.

  • [08-08] Roaming Charges: Empire of the Downpresser Man: Starts with the latest batch of ICE atrocities. Cites (but doesn't link to) a piece by Max Boot: "I hate the war in Gaza. But I still love Israel." In a similar vein of bad people having second thoughts about their evil commitments, St Clair quotes Alexander Dugin: "I come to very sad conclusion: Donald Trump is totally mad. It is the shame. We loved him."

  • [08-15] Roaming Charges: From Police State to Military State: Starts with the question of crime in DC. Then ICE and/or Israel. Among the tidbits is this Newsweek headline: "Intersectional Communist Zohran Mamdani Shows Democrats Can't Quit Obamaism." This is like the answer to the question of after all the garbage up front, what's the dumbest word you can possibly end this headline with? Another amusing bit: in Gallup's latest "most popular political figures" poll, the richest man in the world came in dead last, 5 points behind Netanyahu, 12 behind Trump.

  • Danbert Nobacon [08-08] Economic Terror and the Turbochuggf*ck in Texas: I'm not sure the neologisms help, like "capitrickalist free malarketry" and even "entrapocracy" (which turns out to come from a song title), but the rant about "toxic business activism" and the "Kochtopus" isn't wrong.

  • Nafis Hasan [08-08] War and the Cancer-Industrial Compex: An excerpt from a new book: Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care.

  • Thomas Knapp [08-08] Attack of the Bubble Boys: On Trump and Vance, "isolated and coddled lest contact with regular human beings harm them."

  • Michael Zoosman [08-08] Bearing the Mark of Cain for Naming the Gaza Genocide. A founder of L'chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty regrets that he waited until July 2025 to use the word "genocide" re Israel, and bears witness to the level of "vitriol and recrimination" he's since received.

Adam Gabbatt [08-03] 'He has trouble completing a thought': bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump's mental acuity. I expect I'll be able to find an article like this every week for the remainder of his term. These stories are easy sells because we're so used to associating age with dementia that we think to note exceptions. And of course, some are retribution for the political savaging of Joe Biden's never-all-that-astute mental acuity. Biden had been muddled and gaffe-prone for so long that it was hard to discern actual age-related deterioration from his norm. Trump benefits even more from the camouflage provided by having been crazed and inane for decades now. He himself has claimed that his incoherent rapid-fire hopping among disconnected topics is really just proof of his genius, and the world is starkly divided between those who never believe a word he says and those who celebrate every morsel of "genius" (not caring whether they believe it or not — they're fine with anything that hazes the normies, and Trump is the world champion at that). Same dynamic appeared in his first term, but pre-Biden, the focus was more on Trump's psychopathology, another fertile field for speculation and confirmation bias. While anything that discredits Trump is welcome, we should always bear in mind that the real problem with Trump is his politics, and that having won the 2024 election his administration has little further need of him, so his debilitation is unlikely to offer much comfort.

Adam Bonica [08-03] The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine: "How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns."

Rhonda Ramiro/Sarah Raymundo [08-06] How US imperialism blackmails the world with nuclear weapons, from Hiroshima to today: "Since the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, US imperialism has driven nuclear proliferation worldwide. Current nuclear flashpoints, such as Iran, show how the US continues to use nuclear blackmail to reinforce its dominance." There are two theories behind nuclear weapons: deterrence and blackmail. Neither involves using them, unless one tragically miscalculates and has to do so for credibility. But sane people see no possible value in nuclear war, or in war for almost any other purpose, so they have no desire to test deterrence. Roughly speaking, from 1953 through 1993, the US accepted the deterrence theory, and sought a "detente" with the Soviet Union, rather than pushing its luck with blackmail stratagems (like Nixon's "madman theory"). Since 1993, the US has become more aggressive, but is still cautious when faced with nuclear-armed "foes" like Russia and China (or even North Korea), while growing very aggressive with its conventional weapons. Israel conceived their nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against larger Arab enemies, but that threat evaporated with the 1979 treaty with Egypt, and even more so with the 1991 defeat of Iraq. Since then, their nuclear threat has allowed them to bomb Syria and Lebanon with impunity, as neither nation has any ability to retaliate against Israel. Since the 1990s, Israel has recognized that Iran is capable of producing a nuclear weapons, which could undermine Israel's blackmail threat. So Israel mounted a propaganda campaign to play up the Iranian threat, mostly to hold the US alliance firm (Americans have still not moved beyond the 1979-80 hostage crisis), However, as Israel has turned genocidal, they've found that their credibility depends on showing that they can and will strike Iran, and that they can and will use US forces to reinforce theirs. If Iran's leaders actually believed in the logic of deterrence and/or blackmail, they will proceed directly to developing and deploying their own weapons. There is no evidence yet that this is happening, but either way we should understand that the fault lies in the original adoption by the US and Israel of the nuclear arms race.

More nukes (turns out that FDR jumped the gun: the day that has really stood out "in infamy" is August 6):

  • Tony Karon [08-07]: A Hiroshima-Gaza connection? "Curiously enough, it's Israel's leader that claims the US nuclear massacre of 200,000 mostly civilians in Japan in 1945 legitimizes the genocide for which he's wanted at The Hague."

  • Peter Dodge [08-08]: 80 Years at the Brink, Time to Change the Narrative.

  • Eric Ross [10-12]: Hiroshima Remains an Open Wound in Our Imperiled World.

    Not everyone in the Allied nations shared in the prevailing atmosphere of apathy or even jubilation over those nuclear bombings. Before the second bomb struck Nagasaki, French philosopher Albert Camus expressed his horror that even in a war defined by unprecedented, industrialized slaughter, Hiroshima stood apart. The destruction of that city, he observed, marked the moment when "mechanistic civilization has come to its final stage of savagery." Soon after, American cultural critic Dwight Macdonald condemned the bombings in Politics, arguing that they placed Americans "on the same moral plane" as the Nazis, rendering the American people as complicit in the crimes of their government as the German people had been in theirs.

    American scholar Lewis Mumford likewise regarded that moment as a profound moral collapse. It marked, he argued in 1959, the point at which the U.S. decided to commit the better part of its national energies to preparation for wholesale human extermination. With the advent of the bomb, Americans accepted their role as "moral monsters," legitimizing technological slaughter as a permissible instrument of state power. "In principle," he wrote, "the extermination camps where the Nazis incinerated over six million helpless Jews were no different from the urban crematoriums our air force improvised in its attacks by napalm bombs on Tokyo," laying the groundwork for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. . . .

    In a 1986 keynote address before the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem, "The Final Solution to the Human Problem," [Carl] Sagan argued that Hitler "haunts our century . . . [as] he has shattered our confidence that civilized societies can impose limits on human destructiveness." In their mutually reinforcing preparations to annihilate one another, erase the past, and foreclose the possibility of future generations, he concluded, "the superpowers have dutifully embraced this legacy . . . Adolf Hitler lives on."

    This reminds me of the argument that Hitler succeeded in his campaign to destroy Judaism, not so much by killing so many Jews as in turning the survivors into Nazis.

James K Galbraith [08-07] The Trump Economy? Some Reagan Parallels: "In contrast with the now sober-seeming Reaganites, Trump has taken credit for the economy from day one." Well, not every day, especially with the recent flurry of "fake news."

Melvin Goodman [08-08] Trump's Policies Will Make China Great Again: Well, "great" is greatly overrated, but it's so much a part of Trump's mentality it's tempting to taunt him with for failing on his own terms. In economic terms, China doesn't need America any more. One questions whether they ever did: whether it was just western conceit to see the rest of the world as developing in our footsteps, repeating our same mistakes. For instance, their recent shift from coal to solar has turned them from followers to leaders. Trump, on the other hand, is trying to smash us into reverse.

David D Kirkpatrick [08-11] The Number: "How much is Trump pocketing off the Presidency?" Plenty of detail here, but the bottom line is $3.4 billion.

Bhaskar Sunkara [08-11] Democrats Keep Misreading the Working Class: "Many in the party see workers as drifting rightward. But new data show they're more progressive than ever on economic issues — if Democrats are willing to meet them there." Related:

  • David Kusnet [07-17] How the Left Lost the Working Class — and How to Win Them Back: "To avoid becoming the foil for Right Populism, Left Populists need to respect working-class values of work, family, community, patriotism, and the aspiration for stability and security." I think he's confusing the Left with Democrats here. If you look at the polling for Bernie Sanders, who actually speaks "working class" (as opposed to Elizabeth Warren, who prefers "middle class" although she has a similar meaning and equivalent policies — what's missing is the sense that she's one of us), the Left polls pretty well, as do nearly every Left economic issues. Sure, the "cultural" stuff is more mixed, but Sanders' very liberal views on those matters isn't much of a deal breaker. Center Democrats lost the working class with their trickle-down rationalizations for their pandering to neoliberal businesses (mostly tech and finance) that turn out to be as predatory as the old robber barons. Republicans won a few votes with lies, demagoguery, and salt-of-the-earth flattery, but to call such rhetoric — and that's literally all it is — Populist just betrays your own insecurity with working class folk. [PS: I just wrote that reacting to the headline. Turns out this is a review of Joan C Williams: Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. I liked her previous book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America [2017], so I figure she's mostly on solid ground, and that her use of "Left" instead of "Democrats" targets her prospective readers. Kusnet, by the way, is a former Clinton speechwriter, but from 1992-94, when he was still looking for working class votes, and not just foundation donors.]

Ian Bremmer [08-11] Can Democracy Survive AI? Two better questions are: Can democracy survive capitalism? And can capitalism survive AI? I'm not saying that AI is some kind of value-neutral technology that could equally be put to good or evil purposes. It potentially changes a lot of things. But it is a power tool, and the politico-economic system decides who gets power and how they can use it, and right now all this power is in the hands of a few megalomaniacal capitalists. Regulation may take some of the edge off, and allow for some breathing room, but unless it changes who owns AI and what they can do with it, the threats not only remain but multiply. And note that my first question predates AI. Capitalists, operating under their own logic, have already destroyed much of what passes for democracy in the US. AI is only going to make this worse, at least in the short term. As for the long term, that's harder to speculate on. As Marx was not even the first to realize, capitalism is inherently unstable. AI could make it even more unstable — and if it's any kind of intelligence at all, it probably will.

Sheila Jordan, jazz singer extraordinaire, died on August 11, age 96. [PS: See Notes on Everyday Life for my piece on her.] I read about her failing health a few weeks ago — like so many Americans, she was struggling with the costs of home hospice care, as if agreeing to die wasn't sacrifice enough — but I hadn't noticed that she released an evidently new album this January. [Portrait Now, with Roni Ben-Hur (guitar) and Harvie S (bass), recorded in 2023, and released in time for her last tour date, in Chicago.] Here are some pieces, starting off with obits, plus a few older pieces:

Nicholas Liu [08-13] The Case Against Business Schools: I don't doubt that they teach a few useful practical skills, and sure, you can call them "finishing schools for capitalism's managerial aristocracy," but their real reason for being is to counteract any ethical impulses their students may have, to make them more ruthless and efficient economic predators. Any reference to "social responsibility" is just camouflage, following the Churchill-Rumsfeld quote that "the truth is so precious it must be surrounded by an armada of lies." This refers to a book by Martin Parker: Shut Down the Business School: What's Wrong With Management Education (2018).

Aaron Regunberg [08-13] Establishment Democrats Are Going to Torpedo the 2026 Midterms: "Having failed to learn the key lesson from last year's defeat, party leaders are promoting moderate candidates to run against populist progressives in next year's elections." Steve M called this "the most disheartening thing I read yesterday."

Ian Millhiser [08-14]: Justice Kavanaugh just revealed an unfortunate truth about the Supreme Court: "The Court has a special set of rules for Trump." A couple more pieces by Millhiser, plus some related pieces:

Zach Beauchamp [08-14] The "weirdos" shaping Trump's second term: "A liberal writer explains her journey through intellectual MAGAland." The writer in question is Laura K Field, who has a new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, which is about how a few "intellectuals" are using Trump to advance their own peculiar thinking -- the book page mentions Patrick Deneen, Christopher Rufo, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance, but the interview focuses more on Michael Anton, and mentions Adrian Vermeule and Sohrab Ahmari. First, can we stop with calling them "weirdos"? That doesn't clarify anything, and may make them seem cuter than they merit. Second, while MAGA is useful to these "thinkers," MAGA doesn't need them, because whatever MAGA is, they aren't ideologically driven. At most, they pick up ideas to support gut instincts, with Trump the most obvious case of all. So understanding their "thinking" doesn't help us much, either with their political appeal or with their consequences.

Eric Foner [08-14] The Education of a Historian: "Freedom is neither a fixed idea, nor the story of progress toward a predetermined goal." One of America's preeminent historians reminisces, starting with his star-studded leftist family. Excerpt from his new book, Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays.

Adam Shatz [08-16] 'Like a Hymn': "The jazz pianist Amina Claudine Myers has spent her career weaving jazz, blues, gospel, and classical music into a distinctively personal idiom."

Tweets:

  • Daniel Gilmore [08-01]:

    Increasingly firm in my belief that if Trump had gotten into office and basically just fucked off—golfed, took some bribes, traveled a bunch—he'd be at like 50-55% approvals. Every single day of the ~6.5 months he's been back in power thus far has been an exercise in bleeding himself out.

    To which jamelle added:

    oh absolutely. the issue is that trump is too vindictive to have just let sleeping dogs lie. he wanted to get revenge on everyone that aggrieved him in his first term. i am 100% certain, in fact, that the project 2025 stuff was sold to him as a tool for getting that revenge.

  • Joshua Ehrlich [08-17]: Response to "what's your take on the moment we're living through in 50 words or less":

    we are living in a time of profound suffering and profound opportunity. restoring the post-war status quo is not a solution, and the real roadblock to fixing our country is that nearly all of the will to be innovative is on the side of the fascists.

    I doubt I'd call it "innovation," but they are willing to break convention with little or no concern for consequences, which makes them appear to be dynamic -- something people who don't know any better are easily impressed by.

Current count: 277 links, 20674 words (25025 total)

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Sunday, July 20, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 25 days ago, on June 26.

Some of what follows I've had sitting in the draft file a while. I figured that once I was done with the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll: Mid-Year 2025, the next thing I should do is shake out the accumulated Loose Tabs, plus make a quick tour to catch up with news I've mostly neglected for a month or more. I knew I couldn't get that done by Monday's Music Week, so I kicked it out until the window opened for next week's column. I initially set Friday as the date, but I had until Sunday. No surprise that I'm wrapping this up Sunday evening, knowing full well I could continue working on it indefinitely. But I figure it's good enough for now. We'll talk about next week in the next Music Week.

Internal index:

Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill": I cribbed this from a meme explaining "what's in Republicans' 'Big, Beautiful Bill'?" Reading columns left-to-right, top-down within:

  • More than $3.5T added to the national debt
  • Cuts to food support for veterans
  • $148B in lost wages and benefits for construction workers
  • Billionaires get massive tax breaks
  • Hundreds of thousands clean energy jobs lost
  • 16 million kids lose free school meals
  • Higher premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses, even if not on Medicaid
  • Cuts tax credits for buying electric vehicles
  • Increases in gas prices
  • 16 million Americans lose health care
  • Nationwide increases in energy bills
  • The largest cut to Medicaid in history
  • $186B in cuts to SNAP food assistance
  • New student loan borrowers pay more
  • Billions for surveillance & deportation
  • Largest transfer of $$ from the poor to the rich in history

The bill has since been passed by Congress and signed by Trump, so is now the law of the land. Until it passed, it was essentially true that everything Trump's administration had done took the form of an executive power grab. Trump's ability to impose his will on Republicans in Congress was also evident here: the days of having to negotiate with nominal party leaders like Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan are long gone. The new law validates and extends many of Trump's power grabs. Meanwhile, the courts are bending over backwards to extend Trump's powers even more. Some more pieces follow here (and there'll probably be more scattered about):

  • Matt Sledge [05-28] Trump's big, beautiful handout to the AI industry: The bill "bans states from regulating AI while pumping billions into autonomous weapons."

  • Cameron Peters [07-02] Trump vs. after-school programs, briefly explained: "The Trump administration is withholding nearly $7 billion in education funding."

  • Umair Irfan [07-02] Trump's plan to replace clean energy with fossil fuels has some major problems: "The budget bill sabotages one of the biggest growth sectors of the US economy." There's also a map here of how "The Senate's bill would raise electricity prices in every state." As well as the usual trolling about how Trump is the future of clean energy development to China.

  • Andrew Prokop:

  • Russell Payne [07-02] "Special treatment": How Republicans bought Lisa Murkowski's vote.

  • Dylan Scott [07-03] Republicans now own America's broken health care system: "The $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts will be felt by Americans." I'll believe this one when I see it. Republicans have broken things to hurt many people's lives going at least as far back as Taft-Hartley in 1947, yet they rarely get blamed for anything, with even major debacles quickly forgotten.

  • Nicole Narea

  • Branko Marcetic [07-08] A Tale of Two BBBs: Trump's Big Beautiful Bill vs. Biden's Build Back Better. "It's hard not to conclude from all this that Trump and the GOP simply cared more about the policy agenda contained in their BBB than Biden and the Democrats did about theirs." I suspect that is largely because Republicans have learned that not delivering on their promises costs them credibility, while Democrats don't think they need credibility because even at their most inept they're still a better bargain than Republicans. Even when they went through the motions, as Clinton did in 1993-94 and Obama in 2009-10, they pulled their punches, passing weak measures that did little for their base (and in their trade deals actively undercut themselves). Then both lost Congress, and with it the expectation they could ever implement anything (even when they won second terms). Biden did a little better, but not much.

  • Eric Levitz:

    • [07-08]: The wrong lesson to take from Trump's gutting of Medicaid: "Did the president just blow up Democrats' model for fighting poverty?" This has to do with the debate between means-tested and universal rights. It's easier for Republicans to cut Medicaid because they think it only benefits poor people, who mostly aren't Republicans, so fuck them. On the other hand, if we had a universal right to health care, then we wouldn't need a cut-rate version just to apply to poor people. Medicaid was basically just a band-aid over a much larger wound, which the reductions will further expose. On the other hand, Republicans are ignoring two less obvious benefits of Medicaid: it saves lives of people who otherwise can't afford America's ridiculous profit-seeking system, as opposed to just letting them die, which could expose the injustice and moral bankruptcy of the system, and possibly undermine the social and economic order they are so enamored with; and it also provides a subsidy to the industry, without which they'd be driven to even greater levels of greed and extortion.

    • [07-16]: The lie at the heart of Trump's entire economic agenda: "The White House wants to send Medicaid recipients to the mines." Apt sub-heds here: "America is not desperate for more low-paying, arduous jobs"; "The administration's solutions to this problem are all whimsical fantasies"; "The high cost of post-truth policy."

  • Ryan Cooper/David Dayen [07-07] Ten Bizarre Things Hidden in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill: They suggest that "with the president asleep at the switch, all kinds of nutty provisions got snuck into the bill," but Trump's such a fan of nutty that even if he was unaware, they may have done it for his amusement. The list:

    1. Incentivizing SNAP Fraud
    2. The Mass Shooter Subsidy
    3. The Spaceport Sweetener
    4. No Tax on Oil Drillers
    5. Handouts for Chinese Steel Companies
    6. The Garden of Heroes [$40M to build big, beautiful statues]
    7. A Tax on Gambling Winnings
    8. Unlimited SALT [state and local tax deduction]
    9. Tax Breaks for Puerto Rican Rum
    10. More Chipmaker Subsidies?

  • Heather Digby Parton [07-09] How $178 billion is creating a police state: "A massive funding increase for ICE means more detention camps and more masked agents in the streets."

  • Dylan Scott [07-18] Your health insurance premiums could soon go up 15 percent -- or more: "The health care consequences of Trump's budget bill are already here."

  • David Dayen [07-18] Crypto Week Revealed the Dittohead Congress: "There are no 'hard-liners' in the Republican conference. And nobody interested in standing up for the institution of Congress either." Also on crypto:

    • Jacobin [06-13] The Crypto State: An interview with Ramaa Vasudevan: "The Trump White House has helped install the ticking time bomb that is cryptocurrency directly into our economy. When it blows up, the damage will be catastrophic."

Israel/Gaza/Iran/Trump: Another catch-all topic:

Current Affairs: Nearly everything here is worth looking at:

David Klion [02-27] Chris Hayes Wants Your Attention: "The Nation spoke with the journalist about one of the biggest problems in contemporary life -- attention and its commodification -- and his new book The Siren's Call." I picked this up, because I've started to read the book, although I'm not sure how much attention I want to give it. This reminds me a bit of James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (2000), which starts out with a concept that seems to govern much of everything, but all the examples pale next to the concept, which is more fun to think about than to read about. Interesting here that the interview suggests that Hayes has already moved on. When Klion makes a comment about "the development of a mass intellectual culture after World War II" and finishes with "it feels like we've come in at the very end of that era," Hayes responds:

Part of that is a story about that growth plateauing. There was an idea that an ever-higher percentage of people were going to be four-year college grads, but it stopped at a certain level. That's the structural, sociological part of the story, but it's also technological—we're seeing a generational shift from typing out your texts to dictating them, which seems deranged to me. The move away from writing and reading is clearly happening, and it is more than a little unnerving.

That bit about "growth plateauing" could be his next book. There's already a big, fairly technical book on the subject -- Robert J Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War -- but no one has really written the book about what it really means. For one thing, the notion that Clinton took from Robert Reich that increasing inequality would be palatable as long as there was sufficient growth and upward mobility via education has clearly failed -- and not just because growth has plateaued, which for the US happened in the 1970s, but because there never was (and never would be) enough work for "symbolic manipulators" in this or any world.

  • Eric Levitz [06-24] Is the decline of reading poisoning our politics? "Your brain isn't what it used to be." I looked at this piece, decided not to bother with it, then remembered it while reading the Hayes quote, so thought I'd log it here. I'm sure there's a vast literature on crap like this [I mean: unguarded generalizations based on defective psychological modeling, not that there aren't other kinds of crap floating about] where the exceptions turn the norms to mush. This one tempts me because I read serious non-fiction books, and doing so helps make me smarter about things than many of the people I read are, so there's an element of flattery at work here. But then I read something like: "Garfinkle believes that this aversion to the rigors of abstract thought underlies the left's illiberal dogmatism, and the right's xenophobic populism." Actually, if you had any skills whatsoever at abstract thought, you'd realize that two things that aren't things can't possibly have anything underlying them. I mean QED, motherfucker!

Peter Beinart [04-03] Chuck Schumer Cannot Meet the Moment: "In his new book on antisemitism, the minority leader offers a vision of progress without popular struggle that profoundly underestimates the Trump threat." This covers the book very nicely, but is if anything too gentle to the politician. He is certainly right that it wasn't just the Holocaust that convinced Americans to discard antisemitism: the civil rights movement was pivotal, and not just because most Jews supported it, but because most of us came to see antisemitism and racism as aspects of the same fundamental wrong. Schumer's focus on "left antisemitism" is not just an unwarranted exaggeration but a logical fallacy. All leftists, by definition, oppose all forms of subordination, directed against all classes of people -- Jews, Palestinians, any and every other identity group you care to name. Moreover, the left has a one-size-fits-all solution: don't privilege any group over any other. The right, on the other hand, breeds all sorts of prejudice and discrimination, because once you start with the belief that some people should rule over others, it's inevitable you'll start applying labels -- it's also inevitable that the people the right attack will resist, with some replying in kind, and others gravitating toward the left.

Jews in the diaspora have tended to align with the left, because they seek a principled opposition to the prejudice that targets them, and they understand that defending other targeted groups helps build solidarity for their own cause. (Right-wingers, at least in the US, keep returning to antisemitism less due to old prejudices than to the understanding that equality for Jews, as for any other group, undermines their preferred hierarchy, and their political program. The present moment is even better for them, as they get some kind of dispensation from the antisemitism charge by embracing Israel, in all its prejudice, repression, and violence -- trademarks of the right.) Some American Jews, like Schumer, find this confusing, because they so identify as Jews that they feel obligated to defend right-wing power in Israel that they neither agree with nor fully understand, often by misrepresenting or flat-out denying what that power is plainly doing. And they're so desperate to defend their credulity they buy into this totally bogus argument about "left antisemitism." Note that I'm not saying that there aren't some people who oppose Israel's apartheid and genocide don't also hold antisemitic beliefs: just that any such people are not leftists, and that the answer to them is to join the left in demanding liberty and justice for all. Name-calling by Schumer not only doesn't help -- it betrays one's ignorance and/or duplicity. This is perhaps most clearly exposed in the Schumer quote: "My job is to keep the left pro-Israel." The layers of his ignorance and arrogance are just mind-boggling. But doesn't this also suggest that the first loyalty of the Democratic Party leader in the Senate is not to his voters, to his constituents, to his party, or even to his country, but to Israel? Perhaps that's part of the reason he's served his party so poorly?

One more point should be made here: Israel is not, and for that matter never has been, worried about stirring up antisemitic violence in the diaspora: their solution is for Jews to immigrate to Israel, which they maintain is their only safe haven. They've done this for many years, especially in Arab countries like Iraq and Yemen. So they have ready answers whenever they provoke blowback. Nor do they mind when their right-wing allies use moral outrage against Israel for their own purposes, such as clamping down on free speech in US universities. Worse case scenario: people blame "the Jews" for this assault on their freedom, which they use to market aliyah.

Also worth citing here:

  • Peter Beinart [06-06] The Era of Unconditional Support for Israel Is Ending: Here I was expecting that this would be about the increasing turn of American Jews against blind blank check support for Netanyahu, but it's really more about how Trump has reprioritized US foreign policy to line his own accounts. Nothing to get excited by: even if Trump starts to maneuver independently, he has no principles we can put any faith in, and the Arab princes he's so enamored with are among the world's most right-wing despots.

  • Peter Beinart [07-06] Democrats Need to Understand That Opinions on Israel Are Changing Fast.

  • Ezra Klein [07-20] Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another. This tiptoes uneasily around the arguments, but at least acknowledges that for many American Jews, there are limits to their support for Israel, with an increasing share becoming quite critical. And that many of them oppose Netanyahu for the same reasons they oppose Trump.

Luke O'Neil [2019-04-09] What I've Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News: Old piece, but this dovetails with people I know. In particular, I had two cousins who were socioeconomic and cultural twins (both small town, one Arkansas, the other Idaho), but their views on politics and society diverged radically when one fell into the Fox lair, while the other got her news from sources like the BBC. This piece comes from a book, Welcome to Hell World: Dispatches From the American Dystopia. He also wrote a 2021 sequel, Lockdown in Hell World. Related here:

  • Sarah Jones [07-18] It's Okay to Go No Contact With Your MAGA Relatives. Sure, but is it necessary? In my experience it generally isn't, but I'm not easily offended, or offensive, and as someone who's social contacts are pretty limited in the first place, I don't feel like I need more trouble. On the other hand, I don't go looking for it either, so "no contact" can easily become the norm.

Yasha Levine [06-13] Bari Weiss: Toady Queen of Substack: "How a cynical operative married a California princess, sucked up power, and found fame and fortune and love. And how technology won't save us." I know very little about her other than that she's a major Israel hasbaraist, and that her "The Free Press" is the "bestselling" U.S. politics newsletter at Substack. Levine offers some numbers: one million free subscribers, "somewhere near" 150,000 paid subscribers, and a company valued at $100 million, partly due to investments of patrons like Marc Andreessen ("who also funds Substack") and David Sacks.

William Turton/Christopher Bing/Avi Asher-Schapiro [07-15] The IRS is building a vast system to share millions of taxpayers' data with ICE: "ProPublica has obtained the blueprint for the Trump administration's unprecedented plan to turn over IRS accounts." This is just one instance. Sorry for burying the lead, but for more on the big picture:

Viet Thanh Nguyen [06-16] Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades: "So why are we still surprised when the tide of blood reaches our own shores? Some personal reflections on Marco Rubio and me -- and the roots of Trump's imperial ambitions." PS: I should take a closer look at Nguyen's older essays.

Timothy Noah [06-19] How the Billionaires Took Over: "Yes, Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. But the far bigger menace is the monstrous growth in wealth concentration over five decades that made a Trump presidency possible -- and maybe inevitable. Here's how we let it happen." Long piece, lots of history.

Anatol Lieven [06-20] The 17 Ukraine war peace terms the US must put before NATO: "Threats must be imposed if either side or both reject these demands. The time is now." I've followed Lieven closely from well before Putin's military invasion of Ukraine, and I've found him to be a generally reliable guide, but I'm scratching my head a bit here. Certainly, if they all agreed to these 17 terms, far be it from me to object. But about half of them seem to add unnecessary complications just to check off superfluous talking points. For instance, "7. Ukraine introduces guarantees for Russian linguistic and cultural rights into the constitution. Russia does the same for Ukrainians in Russia." Why should either nation have its sovereignty so restrained? Ukraine was so constrained as part of the Minsk Accords, which turned out to be a major sticking point for Ukrainian voters. Besides, how many Russian-speakers still remain in Ukrainian territory? And how many Ukrainians are still living in Russian-occupied territory?

The arms/NATO provisions also strike me as added complexity, especially on issues that should be addressed later. In the long run, I'm in favor of disbanding NATO, but that needs to be a separate, broader negotiation with Russia, not something ending the war in Ukraine depends on. I could expand on this, but not here, yet.

I wrote the above paragraph shortly after the article appeared. Since then a lot has changed viz. Ukraine, or has it?

  • Aaron Sobczak [07-11] Diplomacy Watch: Trump changes tune, music to Zelensky's ears: "The president's views on Putin shifted dramatically this week."

  • Cameron Peters [07-14] Trump's new Ukraine plan, briefly explained.

  • Ian Proud [07-14] Russia sanctions & new weapons, is Trump stuck in Groundhog Day? "The president who insisted that the Biden era policies did not work finds himself in a rerun of his own first term on Ukraine policy." Which, you might recall, didn't work either. Trump's whole approach to foreign policy was so incoherent no one ever did a real accounting of all the things he screwed up, and what the long-term costs have become -- or will, as some of them are still mounting. Granted, his predecessors did a lousy job, and Biden's analysis of what Trump did wrong was faulty and Biden's fixes were worse. Ukraine is a good example: the drive to expand NATO started in the 1990s under Clinton, but the real demonization of Putin kicked in under Obama, and became much more tangible with the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which led directly to the secession crises and civil war. Trump sat on that conflict for four years, doing nothing but pushing Democrats into a hot lather over his efforts to extort Ukraine to gather dirt on Biden. Biden then tilted so hard toward Ukraine that Putin invaded, leaving the present stalled war -- which Trump campaigned on a promise to "end in a day," something he not only hasn't done but hasn't made any progress at. Speaking of things Trump could have done but only made worse (with no recovery from Biden):

  • Jennifer Kavanagh [07-15] How Trump's 50-day deadline threat against Putin will backfire: "The 'art of the deal' will likely result in the opposite of its intended effect on the Russian president."

  • Stavroula Pabst [07-18] Diplomacy Watch: Will Europe pay for Trump's Ukraine aid? "The Europeans, via NATO, will reportedly pay for the deal."

Samuel Moyn [06-25] Why America Got a Warfare State, Not a Welfare State: "How FDR invented national security, and why Democrats need to move on from it." A review of Andrew Preston: Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security.

Jack Hunter [06-26]: Don't read the funeral rites for MAGA restraint yet: "Influencers in the movement are choosing to turn ire on Israel's role and warning Trump off protracted, regime change quagmire." But Trump is the one with all the power in this relationship, and the chorus only matters when they stay in tune. Besides, it's not like Trump needs, or even wants, ideological cover. His brand is to shoot from the hip, to be unpredictable, to take US foreign policy wherever the money leads. Hunter, on the other hand, is desperately looking for any inkling that at least some of his conservative cohort are anti-war. This leads to a long string of articles like:

Elie Honig [06-27] The Supreme Court Just Gave the President More Power. The Court's ruling in Trump v. CASA severely limits the power of district courts to issue injunctions against Trump's executive power abuses. More Court stuff:

  • Ian Millhiser: He covers the Supreme Court for Vox, and I've always found his explanations to be quite enlightening. I used to cover nearly everything he wrote, but haven't cited much of late, as Vox became increasingly difficult. So we've got some catching up to do.

  • Cameron Peters [07-08] The Supreme Court's order letting Trump conduct mass federal layoffs, briefly explained. I want to add a few points here, that may seem too obvious to mention, but are important nonetheless: (1) if Biden, or any other Democrat, was firing people and impounding money to pursue narrow political vendettas and/or to impose partisan policies, it's very unlikely that the Republican majority on the court would be ruling in favor as they did with Trump; it's even unlikely that the Democratic-appointed minority would allow a Democratic executive doing the same. (2) No Democratic president -- not just a Biden or an Obama, but you could extend the list as far left as Sanders and Warren, would think to invoke such powers, so the Court is risking very little in allowing to a generic "president" powers that would only be claimed by a fascist would-be dictator. (3) When/if we ever have another Democratic president, the Court majority will scramble to shut down this and many other doors they've opened Trump can unilaterally impose his will on government. After all, the main reason for packing the Court was to prevent any future change that would weaken autocratic/plutocratic power. (4) Any future Democratic president will face increasing pressure from their own ranks to make comparably bold actions in search of whatever policy goals were embraced by the voters. Democrats have long been lambasted for failing to deliver on promises. Trump shows that they shouldn't let "norms" and even existing laws get in the way. The Courts won't like this, but contesting it will be political, and will expose the partisan nature of the current packed Court. Savvy Democratic politicians should be able to campaign on that. (Meanwhile, the not-so-savvy ones -- the ones we're so accustomedto deferring to -- should fade to the sidelines.)

    I think the point I'm getting at is this (and let's bring out the bold here): The more Trump succeeds at imposing his agenda, the more he hastens his demise, and the more radical the reconstruction will have to be. Of course, my statement is predicated on strong belief that what Trump wants to do will fail disastrously, even on his own terms. It might take a sizable essay to explain how and why, but suffice it here to say that the more I see, the more I'm convinced. My first draft of that line had "restoration" in lieu of "reconstruction," but when I started thinking of history, my second thought (after the obvious Hitler/Mussolini analogues) was the Confederate secession. We tend to overlook Jefferson Davis as a revolutionary political figure, because his government was immediately overwhelmed by the Civil War. I keep flashing back to a weird, thin book I read 50 years ago, by Emory M Thomas, called The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (1971), which tries to run with the idea. I only remember a few points -- like how late in the war they ran so short of soldiers they considered freeing slaves to fight on their behalf -- but with Trump one could riff on this subject ad nauseum. But it's not like we need more reasons to oppose Trump -- like there's anyone who failed to see Trump as a fascist would wake up and say, "oh yeah, now I see the problem." The more interesting thing is what happened to the Union once they were freed of the dead weight of the slaveocracy. The Civil War has been interpreted as a Second American Revolution, with profound effects, even if Reconstruction itself was sabotaged early by Andrew Johnson, ended prematurely by Rutherford Hayes, and ultimately undone by Jim Crow -- all mistakes that won't be forgotten. I'll spare you my own riffing on this, but lots of interesting things flow from this thought.

  • Karen J Greenberg [07-08] Courts open door to Trump's terrifying "occupying force" fantasy: "Trump's authoritarian playbook just got court approval -- and it won't stop at California."

  • Austin Sarat [07-16] Rule of loyalists: Emil Bove would be the perfect Trumpian judge: "A reckless judicial nominee who would serve Trump's agenda instead of the rule of law."

Kelsey Piper [06-27]: A million kids won't live to kindergarten because of this disastrous decision: "The world's war on child death was going well. Then RFK Jr. came along."

Nick Turse:

Ed Kilgore [07-01] Do Democrats Need or Want a Centrist 'Project 2029'? First thing is they shouldn't call it that, and anyone who thinks otherwise should be disqualified immediately. Trump ran scared from Project 2025, for good reason -- and clearly now, not because he disagreed with it, but because he realized it was bad marketing. Other than that, my first reaction was that it might not be such a bad idea. I'd like to see centrists try to articulate their policies, instead of just pissing on anything coming from the left as unrealistic, unaffordable, etc. I've long thought that if they ever honestly looked at problems as something they'd be obligated to solve, they'd find viable not in the corporate think tanks and lobbies but on the left. Maybe they could repackage ideas like Medicare for All and Green New Deal to make them more palatable to their interest groups, but the core ideas are sound. If so, they have a chance to regain some of the credibility they've lost in repeatedly losing to Trump. And if not, someone can rise from the ranks and rally the left against these scumbags. (Some of whom, like Jake Sullivan, are irredeemable.) More on 2029:

  • Branko Marcetic [07-20] Democrats' Project 2029 Is Doubling Down on Failure: At first this looks like the sort of anticipatory putdown left critics are prone to, but it offers profiles of the project's movers and shakers, and they are indeed a sorry bunch: Andrei Cherny, Neera Tanden, Jake Sullivan, Ann-Marie Slaughter, Justin Wolfers, Jim Kessler. That's as far as he gets, finally noting: "All but three of Third Way's thirty-two serving trustees hail from the corporate world, with a heavy emphasis on finance."

Emily Pontecorvo [07-02] Trump Promised Deregulation. His New Law Would Regulate Energy to Death: "The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers." I didn't read past the "to continue reading, create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles" sign, but scrolling down suggests that there are more articles worth exploring, like:

  • Here's How Much Money Biden Actually Spent From the IRA
  • NRC Expected to 'Rubber Stamp' New Reactors
  • Noem Defends FEMA's Response to Texas Floods
  • The Pentagon's Rare Earths Deal Is Making Former Biden Officials Jealous
  • EPA Claims Congress Killed the Green Bank
  • How the Interconnection Queue Could Make Qualifying for Tax Cuts Next to Impossible
  • Trump Opened a Back Door to Kill Wind and Solar Tax Credits
  • The Only Weather Models That Nailed the Texas Floods Are on Trump's Chopping Block
  • The Permitting Crisis for Renewables

Eric Levitz [07-03] California just showed that a better Democratic Party is possible: "California Democrats finally stopped outsourcing their policy judgment to their favorite lobbies." Well, specifically, they passed a pair of housing bills: "One exempts almost all urban, multifamily housing developments from California's environmental review procedures. The second makes it easier for cities to change their zoning laws to allow for more homebuilding." This looks like a big victory for the Abundance crowd, where California had been a prime example of regulation-stifled housing shortages. (Newsom was explicit: "It really is about abundance." That's the kind of left critique that centrists can get behind, because it doesn't necessarily involve taking from the rich.) What this shows to me is that Democrats are open to change based on reasoned arguments that appeal to the greater good. Don't expect that to work with Republicans. But a big part of my argument for voting for Harris and all Democrats in 2024 was that they are people who we can talk to, and sometimes get to listen.*

[*] Except for Israel, as Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick explain in their book, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. We're still working on that.

Abdallah Fayyad [07-03] Zohran Mamdani's not-so-radical agenda: "Despite the Democratic nominee for NYC mayor being labeled a communist, his agenda actually promises something more ideologically modest." I don't have a good sense of New York City these days, or follow its politics, so I've paid scant attention to Mamdani, even as lots of people I do follow are very besotted with him. But I know my left, so the first thing that struck me here was the implicit fear-mongering of assuming that a "Democratic socialist" -- or any other label you want to assign to someone who initially strikes me as a personable and very intelligent politician, including "communist" -- would run on a truly radical platform. That he won the primary in a city where Democrats are an overwhelming majority should be taken as proof that he presents himself as a reasonable, sensible guy, and that most of the people who have paid attention accept him as such. I can see how people who know next to nothing about New York might easily get confused, but they should just accept that they don't know, and leave it to the people who live there.

I know something of what I'm saying here. I lived in NYC in the late 1970s, when rents were manageable (sure, at first they seemed high after moving from Kansas, but wages -- I made my living as a typesetter, and wrote some on the side -- were better too), and I returned pretty regularly up through 2001 (I was there for 9/11). After that, not so much, and not at all in the last 10 years. My last couple visits were especially depressing, as rents had gone way up, and most of my favorite bookstore haunts had vanished. So I can see how some of Mamdani's proposals could resonate, even as they strike me as inadequate for real change. But that's always the problem for candidates who start out with a left critique but wind up spending all their energy just fighting the uphill battle against past failures and lingering corruptions. Left politicians are ultimately judged less on what they accomplish, than on the question of whether they can retain their reputation for care and honesty, even when they have little to show for it. So I respect them, first for running, perhaps for winning, and hopefully for surviving. But I also have some pity for what they're up against, at each step on the way. As such, I find it hard to get excited when they do succeed, as Mamdani has so far. One might hope that this shows that the people want what the left has to offer. But it may also just show that the people are so disgusted with the alternatives they're willing to try anything. After all, the guy Mamdani beat was Mario Cuomo, and do to some peculiarity of NYC politics he still has to beat him again. Then there's Eric Adams. Sure, in retrospect, Bernie Sanders' 2016 vote was inflated by the quality of his opposition. So, no doubt, is Mamdani's, but it's fun to watch, because he, like Sanders, is a rare politician who's fun to watch.

Ok, more Mamdani:

David Corn/Tim Murphy [07-03] Here are the Declaration of Independence's Grievances Against King George III. Many Apply to Trump.

Lydia DePillis/Christine Zhang [07-03]: How Health Care Remade the U.S. Economy. They lead with a chart showing that health care has become the single largest employment segment, with 13% of all workers, vs. 10% for retail, and 8% for manufacturing (down from a more than double that when Clinton was elected in 1992). The share of spending has grown even larger -- outpacing even housing, which is also growing -- in large part because profits are so exorbitant. They offer some other reasons, which are valid to a point, but profits are the driving force. None of this is news, unless you're one of those people who only believe what they read in the New York Times.

Andrew O'Hehir [07-06] Alligator Alcatraz: American history from the dark side: "Yeah, it's a concentration camp. It's also a meme, a troll and an especially ugly distillation of American history." It's significant enough that Trump has started building concentration camps, but even more important is the effort they're putting into marketing them. They not only think this is a good idea, they think it will be massively popular -- at least among the people they count on as their base.

Alligator Alcatraz, like nearly everything else about the second Trump regime, is a deliberate, overt mockery of the liberal narrative of progress. It's a manifestation of "owning the libs" in physical, tangible and almost literal form. (So far, MAGA's secret police have not specifically targeted the regime's domestic opponents, but the threats get more explicit every day.) Terrorizing, incarcerating and deporting immigrants is an important regime goal in its own terms, of course, but the real target of terrorism -- state terrorism included -- is always the broader public. Liberal outrage, to some significant degree, is the point, as are a mounting sense of powerlessness and increasing anxiety about the rule of law and the constitutional order.

  • Maureen Tkacik [07-17] Meet the Disaster Capitalists Behind Alligator Alcatraz: "Incompetent and militarized 'emergency response' is on track to be a trillion dollar industry by the end of Trump's second term." I've always thought that Naomi Klein's "Disaster Capitalism" was less a stage than a niche, but with Trump in power it's becoming a very lucrative one:

    The forecasters of such things predicted last winter that "emergency management" will be nearly a trillion-dollar sector of the economy by 2030. And that was before Trump declared eight new national emergencies during his first week in office, then went about variously nuking and systematically dismantling every federal agency equipped to respond to emergencies. Disaster capitalism's windfall could come a year or two early, so don't let this lesson escape you. Those who fail to procure a no-bid contract to build the next concentration camp may be condemned to live in it. Or as Crétier himself put it in 2020: "I see the world in a very predatorial way. You're either on the menu or you're looking in the menu."

Sarah Kendzior [07-07] Guns or Fireworks: "America is not its government and normal does not mean right." Celebrating the 4th of July in St. Charles, MO, with a "38 Special" ("fifty ride tickers for thirty-eight dollars"). The title is a guessing game played at the Riverfest ("full of fun, unsafe rides").

Maggie Haberman [07-09] Trump Treats Tariffs More as a Form of Power Than as a Trade Tool: "Instead of viewing tariffs as part of a broader trade policy, President Trump sees them as a valuable weapon he can wield on the world stage." I think this is an important insight, although one could push it a bit farther. Trump has no real trade policy. I don't think he can even conceive of one. He doesn't have a notion of national interests -- sure, he talks a lot about "nation," but that's really just himself: he assumes that the nation's happiness is a simple reflection of his own happiness. He understands power as a means for engorging himself, and that's all that really matters to him. Congress did something stupid way back when, in allowing presidents to arbitrary implement tariffs, sanctions, and such. They gave the office power, so now he has it and is using and abusing it, because that's all he is. I'm tempted to say that nobody imagined that could possibly happen, but that sounds just like something he'd say.

Zack Beauchamp [07-09] Liberalism's enemies are having second thoughts: "Why Trump 2.0 is giving some anti-liberals second thoughts." A rather scattered survey of various thinkers who have tried to critically distinguish their ideas from conventional liberalism, suggesting that there are anti-liberal currents both on the right and on the left. I'm not very conversant with these people, being only vaguely aware of Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed from the right and Samuel Moyn's Liberalism Against Itself to the left, and little else other than the Abundance Agenda (under "Where do we go from here?" where it is viewed as part of the liberal revival). These titles suggest that the problem with liberalism was never what it promised but simply what it delivered, most often because the desire for equality so often fizzled once one's own needs were met.

Charles R Davis [07-09] "This is going to be normal": Soldiers descend on US cities: "The raid on MacArthur Park did not lead to any arrests, but that wasn't the point."

Elizabeth Kolbert [07-10]: Flash floods and climate policy: "As the death toll climbs in Texas, the Trump Administration is actively undermining the nation's ability to predict -- and to deal with -- climate-related disasters." See St Clair (below) for more on this, as well as:

  • Umair Irfan [07-07] Why were the central Texas floods so deadly? "How missed flood warnings and infrastructure gaps cost so many live in central Texas."

  • Cheyenne McNeil [07-08] Cruz pushed for NOAA cuts days before Texas flooding: "The Senator was on vacation in Greece when fatal flooding hit Texas." In case you were expecting him in Cancun.

  • Noel King/Cameron Peters [07-18] Trump cut the National Weather Service. Did that impact Texas flood warnings? "What NWS and FEMA cuts could mean for future disasters, explained." Interview with CNN climate reporter Andrew Freedman. NWS cut 600 employees, including several in key positions in Texas, while FEMA cuts were described as "quite broad." Freedman doesn't seem to think that made much difference. I'd counter that it says much about what Trump considers important. One side effect of all the climate change denialism is that they also wind up pretending climate disasters won't happen, so they don't prepare for them, so they screw up when they do. Democrats may not be any better than Republicans at preventing climate change -- their efforts are mostly limited to subsidizing businesses offering "green" technology -- but by accepting the reality of climate change, and by believing that government has an important role in helping people, they put a much more serious effort into disaster recovery assistance. Clinton promoted FEMA to cabinet level. Bush buried it under DHS, where the focus was countering terrorism (and, extremely under Trump, immigration).

Zack Beauchamp [07-10] Trump quietly claimed a power even King George wasn't allowed to have: "A scary new revelation about Trump's effort to circumvent the TikTok ban."

Adam Clark Estes [07-10] Little videos are cooking our brains: "The future of the internet is a slop-filled infinite scroll. How do we reclaim our attention?" I don't deliberately look at TicToc or Instagram, which seem to be the main culprits here, but I've noticed the same thing with X and Bluesky (although I've found settings on the latter to do away with autoplay). I've certainly felt the sensation, as I would scroll through dozens of short videos, finding it hard to resist, with my will power increasingly sapped. I ordered the Chris Hayes book, The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, after one such session. We'll see if that helps . . . if I can focus enough to read it?

Zusha Ellinson [07-10]: The Rapid Rise of Killings by Police in Rural America: "A 17-year-old shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy on a New Mexico highway last summer was one in a growing number of cases." This is uncomforting reading, even though it seems so predictable.

Jeffrey St. Clair:

  • [07-18] Roaming Charges: Masked and Anonymous: Starts with a long list of ICE horrors, before moving on to climate horrors and other horrors. He offers this translation of Ezra Klein's Abundance: "Trickle-Down for Hipsters." Offers this quote from Astra Taylor:

    Supreme Court says the president can't abolish student debt, but he CAN abolish the Department of Education. This isn't hypocrisy. It's end times fascism—a fatalistic politics willing to torch the government and incinerate the future to maintain hierarchy and subvert democracy.

  • [07-11]: Roaming Charges: Heckuva Job, Puppy Slayer! I assume you get the reference. While nobody expects Republicans to prevent disasters, you'd think that they'd try to seem less incompetent when they do happen, as with no prevention efforts they inevitably do. This starts off with the Texas flood disaster, and covers it succinctly, before moving on to ICE, Israel, and other matters. Closes by repeating his Mid-Year Poll ballot, having written more about Francis Davis (and me) here:

  • [07-07] Sound Grammar: Francis Davis and the Best Jazz of 2025, So Far.

Chris Hedges [07-11] The Persecution of Francesca Albanese: She holds the post of UN Special Rapporteur, charged with investigating the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Having found the obvious, the Trump administration is moving to sanction her. It's not clear to me how they can do that, or what the practical effects might be, but the linkage pretty much cinches the case that Trump is complicit in the genocide.

Michael Brenes [07-11] What If the Political Pendulum Doesn't Swing Back? This revisits Arthur M Schlesinger Jr's 1986 book, The Cycles of American History. Noted because I've been thinking about cycles theory, pendulum moves (including what Bill James called the "plexiglass principle"), and such, although I don't have a lot of respect or interest in Schlesinger.

Dexter Filkins [07-14]: Is the US ready for the next war? Long article on how cool drones and AI are, by a veteran war reporter who lacked the empathy and/or moral fiber to follow Chris Hedges into questioning the whole world. Ukraine and Israel are prime examples, where new techniques for dealing death are being field-tested. The real question isn't how to fight the next war, but why? Filkins, as usual, is clueless.

Adam Gurri [07-14] Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor: "It is the tech oligarchs, not young radicals, who have turned against the system that made them."

Kiera Butler [07-14] Churches Can Now Endorse Candidates and Trump Couldn't Be Happier:

David Daley [07-16]: How Texas could help ensure a GOP House majority in 2026: When I first heard Trump pushing to further gerrymander House seats in Texas, I was surprised they had left any seats open. The current split is 25-12, with Democrats concentrated in the big cities, and everything else neatly carved up to favor Republicans. Turns out there are two districts along the Rio Grande that Democrats won by thin margins in 2024. Still, that depends on Trump consolidating his 2024 gains among Latinos, which isn't a strong bet.

Molly Jong-Fast [07-18]: Canceling Stephen Colbert Isn't Funny. Coming two weeks after [07-02] Paramount to Pay Trump $16 Million to Settle '60 Minutes' Lawsuit, this feels like the other shoe dropping. The lawsuit was utterly bogus, and any company with an ounce of faith in free speech would have fought it to the Supreme Court (or probably won much easier than that), but the settlement is a conveniently legal way to pay off a bribe, and cheap compared to the multi-billion dollar sale Paramount is seeking government approval on. (And Trump, of course, is back at it again: see Trump will sue the WSJ over publishing a "false, malicious, and defamatory" story about Trump and Epstein.) I'm not up on Colbert: I haven't watched his or any other late night talk show since the election. Before the election, I took some comfort in their regular beatdowns of Trump and his crew, and especially in the audience's appreciation, which made me feel less alone. However, with the loss I resented their inadequacy (as well as even more massive failures elsewhere in the media and in the Democratic political classes). But I suppose I was glad that they still existed, and hoped they would continue fighting the good fight -- maybe even getting a bit better at it. At this point, it's pretty clear that Trump's popularity will continue to wane as the disasters pile up. So his only real chance of surviving is to intimidate the opposition, to impose such fear and dread that no one will seriously challenge him. You'd think that would be inconceivable in America, but here you see companies like Paramount bowing and scraping. And as the WSJ suit progresses, how much faith do you have that someone like Rupert Murdoch will stand up to Trump? More:

Kaniela Ing [07-18] This Viral Speech Shows How We Win Back Rural America: "Voters aren't tuning out because they don't care. They're tuning out because they've been exhausted by fake choices, sold out by both parties, and tired of inauthenticity."

Chuck Eddy [07-18] A Load of Records Off My Back. Mixed feelings here, including some I simply don't want to think about. My only serious attempt to sell my music was in 1999 in New Jersey, when we were moving and the LPs seemed like a lot of dead weight -- not least because some flood water seeped into still-packed boxes in the basement, making me think that if I couldn't take better care, I didn't deserve to own such things. I did spend many hours salvaging what I could from the mess: cleaning pulp out of the grooves of vinyl, putting them in blank sleeves. I mostly kept old jazz that I thought I might want to refer back to. I probably saved more money in moving charges than I made selling them. We moved here in 1999, and since then I've never sold anything. I do think of disposing of much of what I have, but it's a lot of trouble for very little reward (and I don't just mean money). Chuck's story doesn't inspire me, but I suppose it's worth knowing that if he can do it, maybe there's hope for me.

Obituaries: Last time I did an obituary roll was May 14, so we have some catching up to do. This is quickly assembled, mostly from New York Times obituaries.

  • John Ganz [06-05] The Last True Fascist: "Michael Ledeen and the 'left-hand path' to American Fascism." I remember him as the right-wing ideologue of the poli sci department at Washington University, back in the early 1970s when I was a sociology student there. I never had any dealings with him, but friends who majored there loathed him (and vice versa, I'm sure). This was well before he became famous for putting bad ideas into worse practice. But while I always knew him as an ogre, this adds much more detail and nuance.

  • John Fordham [07-27] Louis Moholo-Moholo obituary: "Jazz drummer with the Blue Notes who brought enthralling new sounds from South Africa to the wider world in the 1960s."

  • Jannyu Scott [06-26] Bill Moyers, a Face of Public TV and Once a White House Voice, Dies at 91: One of the few people from the Johnson Administration to put Vietnam behind him and redeem himself with a long public service career. I have many memories of him, but the one that always seemed most telling was the story of how he tried to get Johnson to call his program "The Good Society" instead of "The Great Society." Like another politician who comes to mind, Johnson always wanted more, and never got it. (Mary Trump hit a similar note when she called her book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.)

  • Linda Greenhouse [05-09] David H. Souter, Republican Justice Who Allied With Court's Liberal Wing, Dies at 85: "He left conservatives bitterly disappointed with his migration from right to left, leading to the cry of "no more Souters." Which is to say that he was the last of the Republicans to allow decency, good sense, and respect for law to guide him instead of right-wing ideology. He was GWH Bush's second appointment to the Court (after Clarence Thomas), a New Hampshire fellow promoted by John Sununu to replace William J. Brennan (an Eisenhower appointment, and one of the most honorable Justices in my memory). While Reagan's appointment of Scalia sailed through without a hitch, he leaned so hard to the right that the later appointments of Bork and Thomas turned into pitched political battles. Some Democrats feared the same from Souter, but I remember at the time two bits of evidence that suggested otherwise. One was that he showed great respect for Brennan, and solicited his advice. The other was a comment by a friend, Elizabeth Fink, that Souter might surprise us, because as a bachelor he had lived an unconventional lifestyle. She proved right, as she so often was. (Another Liz Fink story: Chuck Shumer used to like to walk up to people on the street and ask them "how am I doing?" He did that to Liz once, and she answered curtly: "you're evil.")

  • Alex Traub [06-02] Alasdair MacIntyre, Philosopher Who Saw a 'New Dark Ages,' Dies at 96: On him, also see Samuel McIlhagga: The Anti-Modern Marxism of Alasdair MacIntyre.

  • Ludwig vanTrikt (66): He was one of our long-time voters in the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, from Philadelphia, worked in radio there and wrote for Cadence. Here are notes on Instagram and Echovita. I've corresponded with him a fair amount, and always found him warm and engaging. Mutual friends have described him as "a really good person," who generously "did what he had to do in whatever way he could."

  • Some more names I recognize: with New York Times obituaries. Connie Francis (singer, 87); David Gergen (political hack, 83); Michael Madsen (actor, 67); Jimmy Swaggart (preacher/con man, 90); Dave Parker (baseball, 74); Mick Ralphs (guitarist, 81); Lou Christie (singer, 82); Foday Musa Suso (kora player, 75); Sly Stone (bandleader, 82); Guy Klucevsek (accordion player, 78); Al Foster (drummer, 82); Loretta Swit (actress, 87); Bernard Kerik (crooked cop, 69); Tom Robbins (journalist, 76); Susan Brownmiller (feminist author, 90); Joe Louis Walker (blues singer-guitarist, 75); Johnny Rodriguez (country singer-guitarist, 73).

    Some more I didn't catch in the Times, but found in Wikipedia: Hal Galper (pianist, 87); Alan Bergman (songwriter, 99); Lalo Schifrin (composer, 93); Sven-Åke Johansson (drummer, 82); Brian Wilson (singer, 82); Robert Benton (film director, 92). Obviously, some names in the second list should have been caught in the first (Wilson, Benton). I also took a glance at Jazz Passings, noting a couple more names (like Aïyb Dieng and Brian Kellock), but mostly from earlier in the year.

No More Mister Nice Blog: This is becoming a regular feature. I may skip the occasional piece.

  • [07-10]: This former(?) right-wing extremist is a smarter Democrat than most of the Party's establishment: Joe Walsh, "who was an extremely conservative Republican member of Congress before he became a Never Trumper," interviewing Dean Phillips, who ran for president as a Democrat in 2024, but now says there's no room in the Democratic Party for both him and Mamdani.

    Moderate Democrats don't have to like Zohran Mamdani. But if they're certain he's bad for the party, they should simply say as little as possible about him. That way, they're not denigrating the party as a whole and they have more time to criticize Republicans -- y'know, the party they run against every election cycle? But Democrats apparently don't believe that criticizing only your opponents is good politics.

  • [07-11]: Republican vulnerabilities are obvious, but the Democratic Party doesn't seem to notice.

  • [07-12]: Live by the ooga-booga, die by the ooga-booga.

  • [07-13]: Oh, look, it's time for the downfall of Trumpism (again): He's being sarcastic. Surely he knows better than to take David French's word for unease among the Magadom, especially over a charge as ridiculous as pedophilia: the reason they love to attack liberals for that is because they like to see them squirm and recoil in disgust (or look defensive in denial), not because they care one whit about the issue. And if you do manage to prove that Trump is guilty, that's just one more feather in the badass plumage they love him for. But this piece eventually comes around: "Republicans don't really fight one another. They hate us too much to do that."

  • [07-14]: This is how Trump thinks he'll turn the page on Epstein? Looks like he's doing some "wag the dog" over Ukraine. He's turning so belligerent that Lindsey Graham is on board.

  • [07-16]: Establishment Democrats choose the least appealing option: There's a lot here on how many of the young male-oriented podcasts that turned toward Trump in 2024 are turning against him, but not toward the Democratic Party (although Sanders and Mamdani have been picking up support):

    The one political philosophy that doesn't appeal to young voters is mealy-mouthed left-centrism, but that's precisely what Democratic leaders seem to want to give us all. They don't even want the Democratic Party to be a big tent that includes progressives, even though progressives seem to have solved the problem -- winning back young voters -- that the party is paying consultants millions to solve.

    There's a fumbled sentence next to the end here. I think what he means is that the party mainstream is so afraid of losing billionaire donors that they've forgotten that elections are ultimately about winning more votes. The Harris campaign offered pretty conclusive proof that raising more money doesn't guarantee winning, especially when you lose all respect doing so.

Mid-Year Music Lists: I usually collect these under Music Week, but it's probably easier here.

Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll: Mid-Year 2025: I had hoped to see more press about our poll, and fear that once again I dropped the ball after struggling so just to get my piece published. I'll collect whatever relevant articles I find here. One sidelight: DownBeat published their 73rd Annual Critics Poll on the same day, competing with our claim to be the biggest critics poll anywhere. I don't mind. I'm not competitive in that way. I'm pleased to see many of our voters getting belated but much-deserved invites, and I suspect that they helped lift the margins of their major category winners this year, especially: Anthony Braxton (Hall of Fame); James Brandon Lewis (artist of the year); Mary Halvorson (group of the year); and Patricia Brennan (album of the year, our winner last year, Breaking Stretch; our Mid-Year winner, Steve Lehman's Plays the Music of Anthony Braxton came out after their disorienting April 1 dividing line, so not a fair comparison there). I'll have to look at their poll more closely, including the list of 251 voting critics, and write more on it later. I did, however, annotate my own ballot here.

Tweets:

  • Middle Age Riot: Picture of bleeding Trump with fist raised:

    FLASHBACK: One year ago, this was staged, I mean happened.

    sassymaster commented:

    you can't grow an ear back. What's the shooter's name? Why no 24 hour media coverage about the shooter. Maybe Jake Tapper will write a book with the answers.

    I threw in this lost-gestating comment:

    Isn't there an Agatha Christie book where the murderer shoots herself in the ear to deflect attention by pretending to be the target? The ear looks good: it bleeds profusely, and is scary close to the brain, but it's safer than anywhere else, so if you were going to fake a shooting, that's the way [to do it].

    I thought of that at the time -- we had just finished a massive Agatha Christie TV binge -- but discounted it only because I couldn't imagine how they thought they could keep such a scam secret. Of course, he wouldn't have had to shoot himself. Once he dropped to the ground, he could clamp a tiny explosive to the ear and detonate it. Killing the supporter behind him made it look more real, and killing the "shooter" on the distant roof brought the story to a sweet ending. The second "assassin" lurking at the golf course further sold the story, which couldn't have been better scripted to propel his "miraculous comeback." And his media critics are so conditioned to never believe conspiracy stories they never questioned it.

  • Laura Tillem [07-13]:

    Just watched the PBS Hannah Arendt documentary. Let me count the ways it is like now:

    1. The rise of Hitler so very much like Trump whipping up hatred against all kinds of people.
    2. The deliberate starvation of the Jews to the point of extermination like Israel's concentration camps in Gaza. As currently being described by Holocaust scholars.
    3. The rise of McCarthy and the searching out and turning in and persecuting dissent in the universities. Like Canary Mission et al.
    4. The lawlessness of Nixon just like Trump.

    Makes me sick.

The Intercept [07-19] No American Gulags. I gets tons of fundraising emails, and delete them nearly as fast as they come in. This looked like one, but is actually an action pitch -- something else I get lots of and quickly delete. If you want to sign up, the link will get you there. But I was struck by the text, which deserves a place here (their bold):

When unidentified people in masks jump out of unmarked vehicles, handcuff someone, take them to an undisclosed location, and detain them indefinitely, that's not law enforcement. It's kidnapping.

When the U.S. government then sends people it's kidnapped to a foreign country, the practice escalates to human trafficking.

ICE is creating a global pipeline of American-sponsored gulags in countries often notorious for violence and human rights violations.

People sent to these overseas prisons have no idea how long they'll remain incarcerated in a country that is not their home.

The U.S. Constitution is clear: Not only is every person entitled to due process in a court of law, but even those convicted of crimes must not endure cruel and unusual punishment.

More than 71 percent of current ICE detainees have no criminal conviction — and still ICE trafficked detainees to CECOT, the infamous Salvadoran torture prison where it's been said "the only way out is in a coffin."

There should be no such thing as an American gulag.

Current count: 276 links, 13502 words (17370 total)

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Friday, June 27, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 23 days ago, on June 4.

I've been busy working on the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll: Mid-Year 2025, which may seem a bit like "fiddling while Rome burns," but quite frankly, we'd all be much better off catching up with this year's still-remarkable parade of new jazz releases, including another bounty of dusted-off oldies, than we are helplessly watching Fox and CNN regale us with what little they can grasp of the world, and how little they -- let alone the actors and ideologues they report on -- understand of it. Jazz is, after all, music for people who take pleasure in thinking about what gives them pleasure, and often who are willing to expose themselves to the frontiers of human creativity. Politics is something nearly opposite: it hurts to even think about it, in large part because it's hard to recognize as human people who are so full of greed, petty hate, and lust for power, the class of people who promote themselves as others' expense, you know, the "newsmakers."

Note that the long comment on Ezra Klein and the long intro on Israel were written a couple weeks ago -- the latter after the bombing of Iran started, but I haven't tried to update it. Most of the tweets were collected as the popped up. (I could probably build whole posts out of them, but they'd be even more scattered than this forum is.) The music stuff has also been sitting around (but I should update the mid-year lists -- or more likely, I may keep adding to that section). Most of the rest of the comments are of recent vintage, even if the articles are a bit old. No doubt I'm missing some major stories. One I'm aware of is the New York mayoral primary, as a lot of my sources are thrilled by how well Mamdani has fared and/or afraid of what establishment Democrats may try to do to sabotage him. I'm going to go ahead and post whatever I have by bedtime, then return tomorrow to my jazz poll and whatever else I have need of working on.

PS: I posted this, incomplete and scattered as it is, end of Friday, figuring I should start Saturday off with a clean state, to get back to working on the Poll. But my mailbox was empty when I got up Saturday morning, and I noticed a couple typos to fix here. (They're not flagged with change marks, which only seem to work on whole blocks.) Then I found some more loose tabs, so added a couple of those. I'll add more in my spare time throughout the day, but there's clearly much more news that fits.

Posting the update on Monday, along with Music Week. I've been extremely swamped working on Poll stuff, so apologies for all I missed or merely glossed over.

Israel: I'm loathe to group articles, but there's too much here not to, especially given the rate at which it is piling up. I've been thinking about revolution lately. It's taken me a while because first I had to disabuse myself of the idea that revolutions are good things. That idea was deeply cemented in my brain because first I was taught that the American Revolution was a good thing, overthrowing monarchy and aristocracy to establish an independent self-governing democracy. Then the US Civil War was a second good revolution, as it ended slavery. Such events, as well as less violent upheavals like the New Deal and the movements of the 1960s made for progress towards equal rights and justice for all. Moreover, one could point to revolutions elsewhere that made for similar progress, although they often seemed somewhat messier than the American models. That progress seemed like an implacable tectonic force, driving both revolution and reform. And when you put more pressure on an object than it can resist, it either bends or breaks. So I came to see revolutions not as heroic acts of good intentions overcoming repression but as proof that the old order is hard and can only give way by shattering. France and Russia are the key examples: both absolute monarchies that could not reform, so had to be overturned. China, Vietnam, and Cuba were variations on that same theme. So was Iran, which was harder to see as any kind of shift toward the progressive left.

Meanwhile, leftists became more aware of the downsides of revolution, and wherever feasible more interested in reforms, reducing militancy to ritualized non-violent protest. On the other hand, while right-wingers also protest, they are more likely to escalate to violence, probably because right-wing regimes so readily resort to violence to maintain control. The result is that revolutions are more likely to come from the right these days than from the left. Which can be awkward for people who were brought up to see revolutions as progressive.

I'm bringing this up under Israel because Israel's far-right coalition government, going back to its formation before the Gaza uprising of Oct. 7, 2023, makes much more sense when viewed as a revolutionary force. The single defining feature of all revolutionary forces is independent of their ideologies, which are all over the map, but has to do with with simple discovery that people previously denied power now find themselves free to test their limits -- which leads them to act to excess, as long as their is no significant resistance.

This may seem surprising given that Netanyahu has been in power off-and-on since the late 1990s. While his sympathies have always been with the far-right fringe of Zionism, and he's consistently pushed the envelope of what's possible in Israel and the world, he has always before exhibited a degree of caution. But since Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who were long identified not just as outsiders but as criminals, joined his coalition, they have effectively driven Israel's agenda: the genocide in Gaza, expropriation and terrorism in the West Bank, military adventurism in Lebanon and Syria, and not starting a war with Iran. Only a truly revolutionary government can go so far off the rails so fast and so carelessly.

Once you dispense with the assumption that revolutions have to be progressive, you'll find plenty of other examples, both left and right, some (like the French) oscillating between two poles, some generated from below (like the French or Russian), some from guerrilla wars (like Cuba and Afghanistan), some were simply gifted (like the Red Army's installation of Kim Il Sung, whose decision to invade the South was not directed by Moscow, nor effectively throttled), or more relevant here Hindenburg's appointment of Hitler as chancellor (the main difference between Hindenburg and Netanyahu is that the former died soon and was forgotten, whereas Netanyahu continues as the figurehead for a regime spinning out of control.

One might note that Israel has always been a revolutionary state (more or less). Ben-Gurion was more artful than Netanyahu, but he always wanted much more than he could get, and took every advantage to extend the limits of his power. Had he believed his own rhetoric in 1947 when he was campaigning for the UN partition plan, he would have legitimated his victory in 1950, but instead he still refused to negotiate borders, biding his time while building up the demographic, economic, and military strength to launch future wars (as happened in 1956, 1967, 1982, up to this very day. When his successor, Moshe Sharett, threatened peace, he seized power again and put Israel back on its war path. He was shrewd enough to caution against occupation in 1967, but as soon as war seemed to triumph, he got swept up in the excitement. Nothing stimulates the fanatic fervor of a revolutionary like seeing what you took to be limits melt away. Just look at Hitler after Munich, or Netanyahu after his American allies encouraged his long-dreamt-of program of extermination.

We should be clear that until 2023, Israel's "final solution" was just a dream -- not that it was never acted on (e.g., Deir Yassin), but most dreams, no matter how vile, are harmlessly forgotten. We can date it way back, easily through Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky, perhaps to the foundings of Zionism with Herzl. And we know well that settler colonialism, even when one imagines and/or professes benign intentions, is conducive to genocide -- perhaps not inexorably, but we have enough of a sample to draw that conclusion. What allowed Israeli dreams to be turned into action was the realization that the restraints which had inhibited Israeli leaders in the past had lost all force, and could be ignored with no consequences.

  • Richard Silverstein [06-06] Shin Bet's Palestinian Proxies Are Gaza Gangsters: I've read a ton of books on Israel/Palestine, but two I never got to but always wished I had are Hillel Cohen's books on Israel's manipulation of Palestinian collaborators: Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948 (2008), and Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967. I imagine the series could continue up to the present day, and will whenever the relevant archives are opened. Given this history, that Israel should be organizing and even arming Palestinian gangs is hardly a surprise, but underscores more forcefully than ever the moral bankruptcy of the occupation. Another lesson that one should draw from this is the realization that if Israel wanted Palestinians to have a stable and docile government, they could easily find people to lead it, and deliver enough respect and dignity to keep those leaders democratically elected. That they don't so isn't due to the intransigent militance of the Palestinian masses, but to their conviction that they can win by grinding the Palestinians into dust.

  • Zack Beauchamp [06-13] The Israel-Iran war hinges on three big things: "It's impossible to know how this war will end. But here's how to make sense of it." Section heads: "What is Israel's objective?"; "Can Iran fight back?"; "How does Iran think about the bomb after this?" All of these points are fairly superficial: the first draws way too much on what Israel says, much of which is obviously misleading; the others ignore what Iran says, and especially the question of whether Iran wants to fight back, or even to fight in the first place. Like many critics, this piece attempts to approximate objectivity by hedging while remaining trapped in a profoundly distorted cloud of propaganda. (The word I first thought of was noosphere, but I settled for a plainer term, which puts more emphasis on its distinctly political construction. Beauchamp is not an apologist for Israel, but he is also not fully independent of a society that accepts the legitimacy of hasbara.) Beauchamp followed this piece with more:

    • Zack Beauchamp [06-22]: Three ways Trump's attack on Iran could spin out of control: "How does this war end?" Which, of course, misses the obvious point, which is that Israel doesn't want this (or any) war to end. They'd be happy to keep periodically "mowing the grass," as they did for well over a decade in Gaza, and if that ever blows back on them, they'd be happy to demolish the entire country (especially given that the prevailing winds for nuclear fallout are blowing away from Israel). The only practical limit on Israel's warmaking is financial: as long as the US is willing to foot the bills, and the American political system is effectively a wholly owned subsidiary of pro-Israeli donors, they're happy to fight on, oblivious to the consequences.

    • Zack Beauchamp [06-18] Trump doesn't have a foreign policy: "What he has instead is the promise of chaos." Instincts not reason, a blind faith that chaos will always break in your favor. He surrounds himself with people who tell him he's on a mission from God. And so far he's gotten away with pretty much everything, so doubt and worry are for losers.

    • Eric Levitz [06-23] 3 ways Americans could pay for Trump's war with Iran: "The conflict could take a toll in both blood and money." Section heads: "How Trump's war on Iran could impact the economy"; "Trump's attack has put American soldiers in harm's way"; "Trump may have made an Iranian nuclear weapon more likely." These are all pretty likely, and much more is remotely possible. Israeli/US aggression against Iran is a species of the Madman Theory, which can only work if the other side remains sane. (Indeed, that's true for all deterrence theories.) One problem here is that the more successful you are at decapitating responsible enemy leadership, the more likely you are to promote someone who's lost his marbles.

  • Chris Hedges [06-10] Genocide by Starvation. Also led me to:

  • Tony Karon [06-18] Tony Judt was right about Israel, wrong about the West. Bob Marley did warn us: "As long as we rely on the existing constellations of nation states, decolonization will remain a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained."

    So, all stakeholders need to understand that they're not dealing with the America they knew 30 or 20 or even 10 years ago. The crumbling edifice has entirely collapsed, and is unlikely to return. There will be no Pax Americana, because Washington no longer sees any incentive to taking that level of responsibility for anything. As the President sounds off like a cartoon gangster from an ancient Hollywood movie threatening to murder Iran's leader and to devastate its capital. The only sure bet here is that even if it did manage to topple Iran's regime, the U.S. of today has no interest in sticking around to manage the chaos that would follow. As Trump made clear in a recent speech in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. is done with "nation-building." (And as it has proven in Iraq and Afghanistan, its unmatched ability to destroy things is paralleled by epic failure to build anything of use to it on the ruins.

    The end of the article is also worth quoting here:

    Gramsci might have called it a morbid interregnum in which the old is dying but the new is unable to be born. But as the late, great Mike Davis wrote in what turned out to be his farewell missive, "Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it. I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumour: a growing inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies . . . Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today's maximum leaders and Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands."

    Which means humanity only has a future to the extent that it can take power from those destructive hands, and collectively chart a different course independent of the tumor-stricken ruling classes called out by Davis.

    By the way, my favorite line in the Davis piece comes early: "In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheikhs, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds."

  • Ahmed Ahmed/Ibtisam Mahdi [06-20] 'The Hunger Games': Inside Israel's aid death traps for starving Gazans: "Near-daily massacres as food distribution sites have killed over 400 Palestinians in the past month alone."

  • Orly Noy [06-20] Why everything Israelis think they know about Iran is wrong: "For historian Lion Sternfeld, Israel's regime change fantasies ignore realities inside Iran and risk repeating historic mistakes."

  • Jamal Kanj [06-25] Ceasefire Not Peace: How Netanyahu and AIPAC Outsourced Israel's War to Trump? This article explains a lot about Israel's policy of sowing chaos throughout the Middle East, dating it to the 1982 Yinon Plan. That's one I was unfamiliar with, but it makes a lot of sense, and is consistent with a lot of otherwise bizarre behavior, like the practice of seemingly random bombings of Syria (and Lebanon and Iraq and now Iran) just meant to inflict terror. In 1979, after the Carter-brokered peace agreement with Egypt, Israel could have negotiated similar deals with Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and come up with some kind of decent implementation of their promise of "autonomy" for the remaining Palestinians, but instead they lashed out at Lebanon and doubled down on repression and settlement in the occupied territories. I don't know whether the Yinon Plan was a blueprint or just a reflection of the mindset which Begin had brought to power, but which was latent in previous decades of Labor Zionism.

  • Vijay Prashad [06-25] Why the US Strikes on Iran Will Increase Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. This is pretty obvious, yet rarely seems to be factored into the war plans of the US and Israel, which invariably underestimate future risks. But there is little evidence that the US cares about nonproliferation anymore.

  • Rahman Bouzari [06-26] Against Israel's New Middle East Vision. Israel "issued an evacuation order for Tehran"?

  • Jeff Halper [06-24] Global Palestine: Israel, the Palestinians, the Middle East and the World After the American Attack on Iran.

  • Medea Benjamin/Nicolas JS Davies [06-25] How the US & Israel Used Rafael Grossi to Hijack the IAEA and Start a War on Iran. Grossi is Director General of the watchdog group that is supposed to monitor nuclear power and weapons programs around the world. This has a lot of detail on its operations and how the information they collect can be abused.

  • Richard Silverstein [06-23] Regime Change in Iran Will Not End Well.

  • Asa Winstanley [06-10] Illegal police raid on my home won't stop me covering Gaza: "The police broke the law when they ransacked my house. When will they stop harassing pro-Palestine journalists?" Winstanley is British, author of the book, Weaponising Anti-Semitism: H ow the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (2023).

  • Branko Marcetic [06-18] Tulsi said Iran not building nukes. One senator after another ignored her: "seems like an odd thing to do unless you really want to go to war."

  • Tom Collina [06-08] Killing the Iran nuclear deal was one of Trump's biggest failures. It's not unusual for bad decisions to take years to mature into full-blown catastrophes. Not that he didn't produce enough immediate disasters, but the tragic costs of Trump's first term continue to emerge. Trump's surrender to Israel in scuttling the JCPOA, along with his let's-just-normalize-business-and-fuck-the-Palestinians Abraham Accords, as well as his signal that the US would always back Israel no questions asked, have lead directly to the current war and genocide. He bungled Ukraine and Afghanistan as bad, and probably North Korea too (although thus far Kim Jong Un has had the good sense not to embarrass him there). Back when Trump was first elected, I stressed that his presidency would result in four severe years of opportunity costs. The assumption there was that most of what he did wrong could later be reversed. That's proven difficult, and not just for lack of trying -- Biden not only didn't reverse Trump on Israel and Ukraine but made matters worse, and that's probably true, if less evident, for Afghanistan and North Korea as well. His second term is likely to be even more irreversible.

  • Jamal Abdi [06-29] How Biden Is to Blame for Israel and the US's 12-Day War Against Iran: "Biden's failure to reenter Obama's nuclear deal helped create the risk for a potentially catastrophic US war against Iran."

  • Jason Ditz [06-12] Israeli Minister Calls for Israeli Control Over Syria and Lebanon: So says Avichai Eliyahu, Heritage Minister and grandson of a former Sephardi Chief Rabbi, whose solution for Gaza is "they need to starve."

  • Jonah Shepp [06-21] 'Regime Change' Won't Liberate Iran: Not that anyone in Israel or the US cares a whit about liberating Iran. Nudging it from one orbit of misery to another, preferably lower one, is all they really care about.

  • Mitchell Plitnick [06-27]: What comes next following the US-Israeli war on Iran? Follows up on his previous article:

    • Mitchell Plitnick [06-13]: How Israel and the US manufactured a fake crisis with Iran that could lead to all-out war. I think he's right that nothing that happened has turned out very satisfactorily for any party. However, his reason for Israel starting the war needs a bit of elaboration: "The purpose of 'Iran nuclear issue' sham is and has always been to create a regime-change bloc in Washington and Brussells to force the Islanic Republic from power." "Regime change" in Iran isn't a realistic goal, but it holds out the false promise of an end to the war other than complete failure, which helps keep the Washington and Bussells blocs bound to, and subservient to, Israel.

  • Jeremy R Hammond [06-26] Lessons Unlearned from Israel's Bombing of Iraq's Osirak Reactor: "The claim that Israel's bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 halted or set back Saddam Hussein's efforts to acquire a nuclear weapons capability is a popular myth."

  • Elfadil Ibrahim [06-24] Israeli-fueled fantasy to bring back Shah has absolutely no juice. That the author even considers the hypothetical gives this idea far more credit than it deserves.

  • Sanya Mansoor [06-27] Israeli soldiers killed at least 410 people at food aid sites in Gaza this month: "Israeli soldiers and officers have said they were ordered to shoot at unarmed civilians waiting for food in Gaza."

Yanis Varoufakis [05-06] In the EU nothing succeeds like gross failure: The astonishing case of Ursula von der Leyen. She is president of the European Union, elected for a second term, and recipient of some big deal prize, although she's mostly been in the news lately for her cheerleading of Israel's Gaza genocide.

Eric Alterman [05-08] The Coming Jewish Civil War Over Donald Trump: "Trump is offering American Jews a kind of devil's bargain: throw in with us against the antisemitic universities and campus rabble-rousers, but pay no attention as we dismantle the traditions and institutions that Jews value." This article has a lot of useful information, especially the first section which shows pretty clearly how Trump is still an anti-semite, and how his particular brand of anti-semitism is especially ominous for American Jews.

Gabrielle Gurley [05-20] Republicans Break the Weather: "The private sector can't match the value proposition of the National Weather Service, but companies work to entice Americans to pay up anyway. What happens if they can't?"

Phil Freeman [05-22] Why Do You Hate Jazz? Who, me? This is Freeman's monthly column, with his monthly batch of 10 jazz album reviews (5 I've heard, only one A- so far: Horace Tapscott), but his intro is a review of a book by Andrew Berish, Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse (2025, University of Chicago Press). Turns out that neither Berish nor Freeman hate jazz, and of course there are things one can learn from their chronicle of people who do. But I'm not exactly psyched to find out. It's a bit like trying to survey "unhappy families": there are so many, so different, and ultimately so pointless. I should, however, check out the other five albums Freeman likes.

Adam Tooze [05-23] Chartbook 387: What fires burned at Auschwitz? On the place of the Holocaust in uneven and combined development. This is a long and very technical piece, the main point being to argue against exaggerating the size and importance of the "death factories" in comparison to much larger logistical concerns of running the war. Toward the end of the article, Tooze also mentions the Manhattan Project: "In this sense the coincidence of the Final Solution and the Manhattan project is significant, not for their identity, but because of the juxtaposition of two such incongruous projects of modern killing." Among Tooze's many recent posts, a couple more that caught my eye:

  • [06-08] Chartbook 389: Europe's zombie armies. Or how to spend $3.1 trillion and have precious little to show for it. "European militaries are repeatedly out of their depths in facing the new world created by Russia attack on Ukraine." The American solution is to spend vast additional sums on warmaking systems -- "to increase their budgets to 3.5 percent of GDP, or even 5 percent" -- but what will they get for all that money? (I was tempted to say "bang for the buck," but bang is about all they'd get.) Relevant here:

  • [06-20] Chartbook 392: Incoming from outer space: The geo-military radicalism of Iran v. Israel 2025. "It takes a conscious effort to comprehend just how extraordinary this war is."

    I don't mean by that the politics of the Iran-Israel clash: the huge international effort to anathematize the idea of an Iranian nuke; or the conflation of Israel's utterly ruthless strategy of preemption and regional dominance with anodyne assertions of its right to self-defense. I mean the strangeness and novelty of the war itself, as a war.

    Tooze focuses on technical issues, the rockets and the distances and the extreme difficulty of intercepting ICBMs, and adds this on top of the vast expansion of drone warfare, which he associates with Ukraine/Russia but was largely developed by the US since 2001. This leaves aside the more political and philosophical points, like why did anyone think this high-tech warfare would work in the first place?

  • [06-22] Chartbook 393: Whither China? - World Economy Now, June 2025 Edition: ". . . or 'Quality into quantity': how to see China's historic development through the veil of macroeconomics." Nearly everything I read about China's economy reeks of preconception and self-absorption, often in support of a transparent political agenda. This one present a ton of information -- much more than I can deal with at the moment -- without the stench, perhaps because there is no stab at a conclusion: just the observation that self-identity as a "developing country" allows for an even brighter future. "Once you are 'advanced,' you are declining."

Barry S Edwards [05-29] Why Did Americans Elect a Felon Instead of a Prosecutor: I would have started with the observation that a great many Americans actually admire criminals. As someone whose childhood was rooted in the years when the Hays Office Code was still in effect, I tend to date this to the emergence of TV shows like It Takes a Thief (1968-70) and movies like The Dirty Dozen (1967), which showed how bad people could be employed to "do good" as defined by American political powers, but said powers' culpability for criminal malfeasance goes back deeper, becoming even more obvious during the Vietnam War. But Edwards starts with mass incarceration. While that could be cited as evidence that Americans are sticklers for rules, it also exposes how arbitrary and capricious the police state is, which erodes confidence in what they call justice. In that system, it is easy to see prosecutors as cruel political opportunists, and "criminals" as their victims -- even when they're as guilty as Trump.

Also at Washington Monthly:

Jared Abbott/Dustin Guastella [05-30] What Caused the Democrats' No-Show Problem in 2024? "New data sheds light on the policy preferences of nonvoting Democrats in the last election." They add "it may disappoint some progressives," but it looks to me like data we can work with. Unlike the cartoon progressives characterized here, I don't have any real complaints that Harris didn't run on sufficiently progressive policy stances. The big problem she (and many other Democrats) had was that voters didn't believe they would or could deliver on their promises. And a big part of that was because they cozied up to the rich and put such focus on raising money that voters often felt they were an afterthought, or maybe not even that.

Sarah Viren [06-06] A Professor Was Fired for Her Politics. Is That the Future of Academia? "Maura Finkelstein is one of many scholars discovering that the traditional protections of academic freedom are no longer holding."

Ezra Klein [06-08] The Problems Democrats Don't Like to See: The co-author of Abundance defends his book and its political program, mostly from critics on the left, who see it as warmed-over, trickle-down growth fetishism that pro-business centrist ("new") Democrats have been have been peddling as the only viable alternative to whatever it is that Republicans have been peddling since Reagan or Goldwater. Unfortunately, both of these ideologies are often critiqued, or just labeled, as "neoliberalism": indeed, they have much in common, most notably the view that private sector capitalism is the only true driving force in the economy, even as it requires increasing favors from the public, including tolerance of high degrees of inequality, corruption, and deceit; the main difference is in ethics, where Democrats tend to be liberal (which is more often hands-off than helping), and Republicans tend to be laissez-faire (which is to say none, or more specifically that any pursuit of money is to be honored), not that they aren't quite eager to impose constraints on others (sometimes as "morality," often just as power). I wish we could straighten this terminological muddle out, as the net effect is to make the "neoliberal" term unusable, and the themes indescribable. This extends to "neoconservative," which has no practical distinction from "neoliberal": they are simply Janus masks, where the former is used to look mean, and the latter to look kind.

Klein's article originally had a different title: The Abundance Agenda Has Its Own Theory of Power. By the way, that link is from a reddit thread. I've never paid any attention to reddit, but the link has a number of interesting and insightful comments, including this one:

I think Ezra is largely right that the populist left needs to: a) work off of an actual coherent vision of the world and b) understand the risks of simplifying policy to simplify politics

To which someone else adds:

It's unironically even simpler than this and makes it wild that the progressives have been unable to figure out Abundance. The entire book and thesis can be boiled down to "the party of big government needs to make government actually work."

That's it. That's the whole thing. The rest of it is presenting theories for different areas that need more or less regulation, for enabling policy to take shape, etc. But that's literally the entire bag. . . .

It's not about a platform for winning elections, it's about materially making peoples' lives better so that they trust you when you say you want to do things.

One thing I've repeatedly tried to stress is that there are major asymmetries between the two big political parties. One is that while both parties have to compete to win votes -- for better or worse, most effectively by impugning the other party -- only the Democrats actually have to deliver on their promises by governing effectively. Republicans have cynically peddled the line that government is the problem, so all they are promising is to hobble it (for which they have many easy tools, including tax cuts, deregulation, corruption, and incompetence). Needless to say, when Republican administrations succeed in their sabotage, Americans are likely to vote them out, but by then they've dug enough holes that Democrats can never quite build their way out, let along deliver tangible benefits, leaving Republicans set up for the next round of political demagoguery.

So I think we should welcome whatever help Klein & Thompson have to offer toward making Democratic government more competent and fruitful. However, before one can implement policy, one has to win elections, so it's no surprise that Democrats of all stripes will focus immediately on the book's political utility. That's why Klein is perplexed: that the Democrats he was most critical of -- "blue-state governors like Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul and top Obama and Biden administration officials" who actually had power they could work with but have little to show for their efforts -- have embraced the "Abundance agenda," while "some of my friends on the populist left" have raised objections. He then goes on to develop his "theory of power," contrasting his own "more classically liberal" credo against "the populist theory of power," under which "bad policy can be -- and often is -- justified as good politics." This part of his argument is somewhat less than coherent -- even if I gave up my reluctance to accept his redefinition of "populism" -- and unlikely to be useful anyway.[*]

In his conclusion, Klein says:

So I don't see any contradiction between "Abundance" and the goals of the left. I don't think achieving the goals of the modern left is even possible without the overhaul of the state that "Abundance" envisions.

I haven't read his book[**], so I can't point to specifics one way or the other, but I also don't see the contradiction: there certainly are goods and services that we could use more of, and that's even more true elsewhere in the world. And it would be good to produce them more efficiently, at lower cost, and/or higher quality, which is to say that we should work on better systems and policies. But while I don't doubt that there is room for growth on the supply side, the larger problem for most people is distribution: making sure that everyone's needs are met, which isn't happening under our current system of price-rationed scarcity. A more explicit identification with the left, including more emphasis on distribution, and acknowledgment of other important issues like precarity, debt, and peace, would have improved his points about building things and trust.

It also would have made his agenda harder to co-opt by Democratic politicians who are basically bought and paid for by rich donors, who seem to be little troubled by rare it is that most of their voters ever benefit from the crumbs left over from their corruption. As Robinson points out, "They insist that their agenda is not incompatible with social democracy and wealth redistribution. But it's clearly a different set of priorities." It's a set of priorities that cause no alarm to the donor class, and may even whet their appetite, and that's why their agenda has the appeal it has, and is drawing the criticism it deserves.[***]

[*] In Kansas, where Thomas Frank and I were born, populism was a decidedly left-wing movement, mostly rooted in debt-saddled free farmers (like my great-grandfather, not that I know anything about his politics). Frank defends this view in The People, No! A Brief History of Anti-Populism (2020). Also see his especially biting critique of the business/financial wing of the Democratic Party, Listen, Liberal! Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016). It's easy to condemn liberals as elitist when they recoil so fervently against common folk, even if in theory they believe everyone should share in their blessings. As for theories of power, there are some that make sense. The largely forgotten Rooseveltian countervailing powers is one, with faint echoes in recent antitrust and pro-union work. Anarchists have a more negative theory of power -- negative both in the sense that power is intrinsically bad, and that in almost always generating resentment and blowback it is dysfunctional. As a child, I was exposed to the saying, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," and I've found that to be true.

[**] I wouldn't rule out reading the book in the future, especially if I find myself in need of boning up on certain technical issues like housing and infrastructure development. I read Klein's Why We're Polarized (2020), and found it to be worthwhile, especially for citing and digesting a lot of technical political science literature. I certainly wouldn't read him to expose him as an idiot and/or crook, as Nathan J Robinson suggests in his review below. I also wouldn't read Matthew Yglesias's One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger (2020) for that reason, although I'd probably find even more evidence there.

[***] Aside from political agenda and policy mechanics -- various critiques on specific policies, especially their lack of concern for "intellectual property" rents, which is a major cost concern, a source of artificial scarcity -- there is a third strain of criticism, having to do with growth itself. There is good reason to acknowledge that sooner or later growth will have to slow and stabilize, or we will eventually fall victim to crashes. This was my initial reaction to "Abundance," and one I'd like to return to at some point, but while such crashes may hypothetically not be distant in the future, they could be much better managed if only people were more able to deal with immediately pressing political problems.

  • Nathan J Robinson [06-13] Abandon "Abundance": "The latest Democratic fad sidelines equality and justice in favor of a focus on cutting red tape. This is not the path forward." After having complained about the masochism of having to read the book -- even after he's repeatedly made sport of dissecting much more obvious right-wing dimwits -- at least he admits this much: "Some of what's in Abundance is both true and important." The question this raises is whether, from a practical political standpoint, it does more good to cite Abundance in support of the "true and important" bits, or to discredit Klein & Thompson for the parts they get wrong, or that they use disingenuously. Robinson focuses on the latter, but that's what you'd expect from a critic (or just a rigorous thinker). For instance, he points out their use of motte-and-bailey arguments, which allow common sense to be turned into exaggerated claims, which when challenged can retreat into common sense. (I mean, who doesn't hate red tape?) Supporters can then pick and choose among such claims. For example, "Klein might personally believe in wealth redistribution and unions, but he's offered a great program for billionaires who don't want us to talk about the predations of the health insurance industry or big corporations crushing union drives. Let's talk about zoning reform instead!" He also points out how the authors ingratiate themselves with Democratic royalists by misrepresenting critics on the left: especially, "they spend more pages criticizing Ralph Nader and the degrowth movement (both politically marginal) than they do explaining how corporate power stands in the way of, for example, a universal healthcare system."

  • Nathan J Robinson [2024-12-03] Matt Yglesias Is Confidently Wrong About Everything: "The Biden administration's favorite centrist pundit produces smug psuedo-analysis that cannot be considered serious thought. He ought to be permanently disregarded." Yglesias and Klein are bound together as co-founders of Vox, from which they both bounded for more lucrative pastures. Yglesias in particular has repeatedly been a pioneer in new ways to exploit the internet. I read a lot by him for a long time, finally losing interest when he left Vox for Bloomberg and Substack and made his bid for the Thomas Friedman market with his One Billion Americans -- which fits in here as a prototype for Abundance. Because this piece came out back in December (when I was avoiding any and all news sources), Robinson doesn't dwell on that connections, while dwelling on numerous other faux pas. (It's impossible for me to mention either Yglesias or Klein in my household without being reminded of their support for the Iraq War.) I also just discovered that Robinson wrote a review of One Billion People back on [2020-11-13]: Why Nationalism Is a Brain Disease.

By the way, Mamdani showed us how a leftist can take the Abundance arguments and build on them instead of just carping about their compromises and blind spots, see:

  • Plain English with Derek Thompson [06-23] NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani on Abundance, Socialism, and How to Change a Mind: An interview by the co-author of Abundance. Mamdani opens with a very precise and polished argument:

    As someone who is very passionate about public goods, about public service, I think that we on the left have to be equally passionate about public excellence. And one of the most compelling things that I think Abundance has brought into the larger conversation is how we can make government more effective, how we can actually deliver on the very ideas that we are so passionate about, and a recognition of the fact that any example of public inefficiency is an opportunity for the argument to be made against the very existence of the public sector.

    And so to truly make the case time and time again that local government has a role in providing that which is necessary to live a dignified life, you have to ensure that every example of government's attempt to do so is one that is actually successful. And I think that's what speaks to me about abundance. And I think that's the line in the speech that speaks of both who we're fighting for but also the fact that we're delivering on that fight. And it's one that is actually experienced each and every day by New Yorkers across the five boroughs.

  • Batul Hassan [06-23] Zohran Mamdani Is Proposing Green Abundance for the Many: Among other things, quotes Bernie Sanders, with his own framing: "The government must deliver an agenda of abundance that puts the 99 percent over the 1 percent."

  • Ross Barkan [03-26] Why 'Abundance' Isn't Enough: Looking for more of Sanders' thinking on Abundance, I found this, which posits Sanders as the better alternative. I don't see that one has to make the choice. But what should be clear is that inequality is the big picture problem, which cannot be ignored when dealing with smaller, more technical problems like "abundance."

Ben Rhodes [06-08] Corruption Has Flooded America. The Dams Are Breaking. I don't doubt that crypto represents yet another higher stage of corruption than ever before, but the dams broke long ago, most obviously in the "greed is good" 1980s, not that they ever held much water in the first place. "President Trump has more than doubled his personal wealth since starting his 2024 election campaign." But most of that is phony paper wealth, slathered onto his corpulence like flattery.

Henry Grabar [06-10] It's Robotaxi Summer. Buckle Up. "Waymo and Tesla offer competing -- and potentially bleak -- futures for self-driving cars in society."

Doug Henwood [06-13] We Have Always Lived in the Casino: "John Maynard Keynes warned that when real investment becomes the by-product of speculation, the result is often disaster. But it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins." I flagged this because it seems like an interesting article, but I can't read it because it's behind their paywall. Speaking of which, some more articles I clicked on but cannot read:

  • Adam Serwer [05-27] The New Dark Age: "The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself." Starts talking about "the warlords who sacked Rome," suggesting that they were less culpable than Trump for the benighted period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Maybe, or maybe not. But having read Jane Jacobs' Dark Ages Ahead (2005), I'm inclined to view Trump and his minions less as instigators of a Dark Age than as an example.

  • Adam Serwer [06-08] Musk and Trump Still Agree on One Thing: "Whatever they may be fighting about, they are both committed to showering tax cuts on Americans who already have more than they need."

Jeffrey St Clair

    [06-13] Roaming Charges: From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Venice Beach: "It's becoming clearer and clearer every day that the South finally won the Civil War and the Insurrectionists won J6." Also: "The drones are coming home to roost." Also quotes Greg Grandin: "Only fools believed Trump is somehow antiwar. He's not a break with neocons but their evolution."

  • [06-27] Roaming Charges: After Midnight: "Trump mega-bombed a mountain in Iran and called it peace." St Clair doubts the effectiveness of the bombing. I don't have any particular stake in that argument. Anything that was damaged in the bombing, including the people who were killed or maimed, can be replaced easily enough. The physics and technology of nuclear weapons have been understood since the 1940s. At the end of WWII, the US rounded up all of Germany's atomic physicists and holed them up on a farm on rural England. They had spent years fiddling and fumbling in their efforts to build even a simple reactor, but what confused them was their uncertainty that it might work. Within two days of hearing about Hiroshima, they figured out a functional design. They couldn't build one. That took the Russians four more years, not because they had to figure out how it worked, but because the materials were hard to come by, and the processes complex. It took France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea even longer, but they all did it, and the timelines have more to do with motivation than with skill. A number of other nations, most obviously Germany and Japan, have demonstrated they have all the skills they need. It is, after all, easier to get a bomb to blow up than it is to keep a power plant from melting down. Iran, too, has amply demonstrated that they have the necessary skills, and for that matter the materiel. Netanyahu was probably right way back in the 1990s that Iran could produce atomic bombs from their program within 3-5 years, or 6-12 months, or whatever time frame he was projecting to panic his people and allies. That Iran never met his timelines is primarily because they didn't see the point of actually having nuclear weapons. Perhaps they were thinking that if Israel and America could see that they could, that would be enough of a deterrent to keep them from being attacked. Perhaps that thinking even worked until now. The big problem with the "madman theory" is that it assumes the other side will always be the sane one, without bothering to examine one's own sanity in contemplating such a contest. Iran's quite rational notion of deterrence failed because Netanyahu and Trump have not only called Iran's bluff, they've upped the ante, giving Iran the one necessity it was lacking: motivation. The gamble is that Iran will still realize that nuclear weapons are useless, a fool's game. They only seem to have value as a deterrent, but that no longer works against Netanyahu and Trump, who act like they're daring Iran in hopes of burying the entire country under mushroom clouds. After all, what's the point of nuclear superiority if you can't use it to extort your enemies and force them to submit to your will?

    Also linked here:

    Further down, St Clair spots a tweet by Stephen Miller:

    The commentary about NYC Democrats nominating an anarchist-socialist for Mayor omits one point: how unchecked migration fundamentally remade the NYC electorate. Democrats change politics by changing voters. That's how you turn a city that defined US dominance into what it is now.

    That's a fairly accurate description of New York City, but from the 1880s through 1910s, when borders really were open (albeit only for whites). The result was a long series of Irish-, Italian-, and Jewish-American mayors. And he's right that their descendents, mostly with Democratic mayors, led New York City to a dominant position in American finance and culture. They've also made it the richest and least affordable city in America, but even with all that wealth few New Yorkers see Republican nihilism as an attractive proposition.

Peter Shamshiri [06-16] The Politics of Eternal Distraction: "To some Democrats, everything Trump does is designed to distract you." It's taken Democrats an awful long time to realize that much of what Trump does is sheer distraction, so when they point that out, along comes someone to attack you for overstating your insight: after all, some of what Trump does is so plainly damaging that he needs this other crap to distract you from what he's really doing. I can't sort this out right now, but I'd caution against thinking that the "distractions" are the harmless parts: they often reveal what Trump is thinking, even where he doesn't have the capacity to deliver. That he even says he wants to do something profoundly stupid should make you suspicious of everything else, even if superficially plausible. But also you have to guard against getting carried away responding to every feint he throws your way. The word "distraction" can help in that regard, if immediately followed by redirecting back to something important.

Charlotte Klein [06-19] Are You a $300,000 Writer? "Inside The Atlantic's extremely expensive hiring spree." A certain amount of professional jealousy is inevitable with articles like this, and is indeed much of the interest. I mean, they could hire me for much less than any of these writers I've mostly never heard of, and I could write some genuinely interesting content -- mostly innovative engineering solutions to tricky political problems -- that won't read like everyone else's warmed-over punditry. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't want to write what they're so eager to pay for. I don't know who's footing the bills behind their current menu, but they're up to no good.

Scott Lemieux [06-19] Getting the war criminals back together: Quotes Elisabeth Bumiller seeking the sage advise of a washed up US General:

One person who sees little similarity between the run up to Iraq and now is David H. Petraeus, the general who commanded American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and led the 101st Airborne Division in the initial invasion in Baghdad. "This is clearly the potential run up to military action, but it's not the invasion of a country," he said on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, and order him to agree to the complete dismantlement of his nuclear program or face "the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people." If the supreme leader rejects the ultimatum, Mr. Petraeus said, "that improves our legitimacy and then reluctantly we blow them to smithereens."

Nobody's even talking about fixing Iran here. There's no warning that "if you break it, you own it." They just want to fuck it up, leave it bruised and bleeding in a ditch somewhere, washing their hands of the whole affair . . . unless they have to come back and do it again, which they probably will. Sheer nihilists, because that's the power they think they have.

Ryan Cooper [06-20] Climate Change Will Bankrupt the Country: "Climate-fueled disasters cost America almost a trillion dollars over the last year, far more than economists predicted." By "economists" he's referring to work by William Nordhaus, which he was critical of at the time and even more so now. The price tag will only continue to rise, and with it private insurance becomes increasingly untenable. While this will be bad for everyone, the ones with the most to lose are property owners and lenders, who will experience ever greater precarity, and no doubt will finally be driven to attempt to socialize their risks. This will be a huge political factor in coming years. The phrase "too big to fail" will haunt us. And while one may debate the merits of bailing out individual companies, the whole country poses a somewhat different problem: who's big enough to bail us all out?

Josh Dawsey/Rebecca Ballhaus [06-20] Stephen Miller's Fingerprints Are on Everything in Trump's Second Term: "The deputy chief of staff has played an outsize role in immigration -- and amassed more power than almost anyone else at the White House." Also on Miller:

Naomi Bethune [06-24] ICE Impersonators Proliferate Amid the Agency's Undercover Tactics: "Pretending to be an ICE agent to commit crimes is disturbingly easy."

David Klion [06-24] State of Exception: National Security Governance, Then and Now.

Carol Schaeffer [06-27] NATO Rolls Out the Red Carpet for Trump, the President Who Would Be King: "The NATO secretary general has one mission: Keep Trump happy. And to keep Trump happy, you sacrifice your difnity and treat him like a monarch." I haven't followed the recent NATO summit or anything else tied to the organization, like NATO's ringing endorsement of bombing Iran, or the recent pledges to radically increase military spending (see "#0523Tooze">Tooze above), but it appears that Europe's military elite have overcome their first-term jitters and Biden-interregnum relief with the realization that it isn't ideological for Trump: you just have to suck up and pay up. And that seems to be what's going on here. What isn't clear yet is whether their governments will go along with the charade. Being a general has been a pretty pointless job in Europe since 1948 -- or since the 1960s for those states still holding down their colonies -- but irrelevancy has led to some degree of autonomy, which seems to be at play here. And if all it takes to make Trump happy is to buy a lot of crap and scrape and bow (or curtly salute), that just feathers their nests. The risk, of course, is that some Madeleine Albright will come along and dare them to use their arms, starting wars that will inevitably turn sour, but for now, Trump is a bonanza.

  • Anatol Lieven [06-20] The 17 Ukraine war peace terms the US must put before NATO. I originally had the Schaeffer article hung under a mere mention of this piece, then rediscovered it and wrote a longer comment, so I moved this piece here. Meanwhile, I wrote something longer on this piece into the drafts file, figuring I'd return to it later. I still may, but seeing as how it's already in play, let me quote myself here:

    "Threats must be imposed if either side or both reject these demands. The time is now." I've followed Lieven closely from well before Putin's military invasion of Ukraine, and I've found him to be a generally reliable guide, but I'm scratching my head a bit here. Certainly, if they all agreed to these 17 terms, far be it from me to object. But about half of them seem to add unnecessary complications just to check off superfluous talking points. For instance, "7. Ukraine introduces guarantees for Russian linguistic and cultural rights into the constitution. Russia does the same for Ukrainians in Russia." Why should either nation have its sovereignty so restrained? The first part was part of the Minsk Accords, and turned out to be a major sticking point for Ukrainian voters. Besides, the ceasefire line effectively removes most Russian-speakers from Ukraine. And how many Ukrainians are still living in Russian-occupied territory? The arms/NATO provisions also strike me as added complexity, especially on issues that should be addressed later. In the long run, I'm in favor of disbanding NATO, but that needs to be a separate, broader negotation with Russia, not something that is partly tucked into ending the war in Ukraine. I could expand on this, but not here, yet.

Ukraine is now wrapped up in the larger question of NATO, where the question is increasingly whether Europe will continue to accept its subordinate role in the imposition of a regime of Israeli-American militarism. For now, those in power seem willing to play (and pay) along, but how long will such an attitude remain popular in supposed democracies?

No More Mister Nice Blog: This might as well become a regular feature. I've skipped over a few pieces, mostly about the NYC mayor race, which are also of interest:

  • [06-10]: Gosh, if only there were a way to test the premise that the LA protests are an "80-20 issue" favoring Republicans: "Hand-wringing Trump critics think America won't vote for a candidate who's linked to controversial protests, and they cling to this belief even though America just elected the guy who did January 6." He also offers some sound advice:

    Why can't Trump critics be advocates for their own side? Why must they echo right-wing critiques of the protest movement? Given the way most Americans consume news these days, I'm guessing that it might not register on many voters that the protestors are waving Mexican flags (and that they should see this as a moral outrage) until they start hearing about the flags from both sides. (Compare this to the war on "woke" language: I'm sure most voters have now heard the word "Latinx" far more often from centrist Democratic language police than they have from actual "woke" Democrats.)

    I'll say it again: If your critique of Democrats/liberals/progressives echoes right-wing critiques, shut up. You're just an extra megaphone for the right, which doesn't need any help getting its messages out. . . . So please stop the tone policing, and stick up for your side.

    My bold.

  • [06-11]: Trump came into office wishing a mf'er would: "Two commentators I respect . . . believe that Donald Trump is militarizing Los Angeles out of weakness. I don't think that's true."

  • [06-13]: Everyone knows that only Republicans are normal!: "They're engaging in totalitarian repression, obviously, but they claim they're freeing people." Exmaples of Republican "normalcy" follow.

    Republicans struggle with the idea that anyone could possibly want to live in a place where people are of very different ethnic backgrounds, speak different languages, and have different religious beliefs (or non-beliefs), just as they struggle with the idea that anyone could be unalterably gay or bi or pan or trans just because they aren't. They struggle with the idea that anyone would want to live in a city where you can do most of your errands in a fifteen-minute radius, because they're used to long drives whenever you have to run errands. Increasingly, they're selling the message that everyone wants a marriage consisting of a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home "tradwife" who gives birth to large numbers of children, after marrying young (and preferably as a virgin), and they can't believe anyone really wants a life that's different from that.

    It is true that Republicans have chosen to represent an imagined majority: a large bloc of people who can be characterized as "true Americans" and flattered as "patriots." They can be treated as a socially and economically cohesive bloc, with some sleight of hand added to line them up behind the true economic powers. This has always been true: it was built into the design of the Republican Party in the 1850s, when white, protestant free soil farmers and small-time business and labor actually formed something close to a majority of voters. That's baked into the initials GOP, which writers (including me) find irresistible because we tire of overly repeating words, especially "Republican." (It's effectively a proprietary pronoun. One of the many asymmetries of our warped politics is that Democrats don't have an equivalent pronoun or alias.) Republicans are skating on thin ice here: their "majority" is thinning out, haphazardly reinforced as various ethnic groups become honorary whites, and various sects are accepted as close enough to protestants (the new term is "Judeo-Christian," with "Abrahamic" in the wings, held back by the political opportunism of anti-Islam bigotry.) But the larger risk Republicans run is that they don't represent their voters at all well. They lie to them, they steal from them, they double-cross them whenever they see an opportunity to make a quick buck. On the other hand, Democrats are developing their own nascent myth of a majority built on diversity, equity, tolerance, mutual respect and aid, and solidarity.

  • [06-14]: Trump's muddled, on-and-off militarism won't split the GOP at all.

  • [06-18]: Jeb Bush was right about Trump and "chaos". Cites a piece by Jamelle Bouie ([06-18: Maybe Trump and Miller Don't Understand Americans as Well as They Think They Do), regarding Trump's polling slump.

  • [06-21]: Your right-wing neighbors still don't believe the Minnesota shoter was a conservative ideologue: I haven't yet cited any articles on the June 14 assassination of Democratic politicians in Minnesota, but the basic facts are available on Wikipedia (2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators), not for lack of interest or alarm but mostly a matter of timing. That right-wingers have worked overtime to twist the stories into unrecognizable shapes is unsurprising: if anything, it's standard operating procedure, and the examples are as telling as their penchant for gun-toting vigilantism. One of the most fundamental differences between right and left is that only the former believes that violence works, and will resort to it readily (and will lie about it afterwards, because that's even more part of their nature). Two earlier pieces on the shootings:

  • [06-22]: To your right-wing neighbors, this will be Trump's war only if it works. Cites a Joshua Keating article ([06-21]: This time, it's Trump's war) I had initially skipped over.

  • [06-23]: Will Democrats be too high-minded to respond to young people's war fears? I don't know what he means by "high-minded." What Democrats need to do is convey the view that any time Americans pull the trigger that represents a failure of American foreign policy, regardless of whether you hit the target or not. Of course, from 2021-25, Biden was the one demonstrating incompetence by not preventing war situations from developing and/or spreading. But why show Trump the slightest leniency when the voters cut them no slack?

  • [06-26]: In New York, I'm enjoying this billionaire freakout.

  • [06-28] The Supreme Court's Republicans know our side will never use the power they've potentially given us: The Supreme Court "ruled that lower-court judges can't protect even fundamental constitutional rights using nationwide injunctions."

    The Supreme Court's Republicans aren't worried that the shoe might be on the other foot someday because they know the shoe will never be on the other foot. This is why they're willing to give Donald Trump nearly unlimited power: they know that any Republican would use the power in ways they like and no Democrat would ever use it in ways they dislike. They're giving powerful weapons to Trump and future party-mates because they know the enemy -- Democrats -- will never use those weapons.

Tweets:

  • Alan MacLeod [06-05]: The most American leading ever: Kids could end up in foster care over lunch debt, Pennsylvania school district warns parents

  • Adam Serwer [06-08]: Don't let Trump and Musk's feud obscure their fundamental agreement: Both men and the party they own are committed to taking as much as possible from Americans who need help in order to give to those who have more than they could ever want. [link to his Atlantic article: Musk and Trump Still Agree on One Thing]

    For years, commentators have talked about how Trump reshaped the Republican Party in the populist mold. Indeed, Trumpism has seen Republicans abandon many of their publicly held commitments. The GOP says it champions fiscal discipline while growing the debt at every opportunity. It talks about individual merit while endorsing discrimination against groups based on gender, race, national origin, and sexual orientation. It blathers about free speech while using state power to engage in the most sweeping national-censorship campaign since the Red Scare. Republicans warn us about the "weaponization" of the legal system while seeking to prosecute critics for political crimes and deporting apparently innocent people to Gulags without a shred of due process. The GOP venerates Christianity while engaging in the kind of performative cruelty early Christians associated with paganism. It preaches family values while destroying families it refuses to recognize as such.

    Yet the one bridge that connects Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump is slashing public services while showering tax cuts on the rich. This is the Republican Party's most sacred, fundamental value, the one it almost never betrays. Whatever else Trump and Musk may fight about, they are faithful to that.

  • Nathan J Robinson [06-09] goddamnit so many @curaffairs readers have requested a review of "Abundance" that now I'm having to write it. why do our readers want me to suffer[?]

    I commented: Why, compared to idiots you love writing about (like Peterson & Rufo), is Klein a sufferance? Maybe it takes more work to accept and build on what he offers than to trash it as not enough or some kind of sellout, but the idea that Dems need to build/deliver isn't wrong.

    When I clicked on post, I got a pop-up saying: "Want more people to see your comment? Subscribe." The days when social media companies were happy just to profit off our free content are obviously over. Now in their pay-to-play racket they view everyone as an advertiser, which will tend to reduce every comment to the credibility level of advertisements (i.e., none: advertising has been proudly post-truth for over a century, and indeed was born that way).

  • Richard D Wolff [06-09] US liberals also enabled Trump. They let the right enlist them against the left after 1945. As the GOP right-turned authoritarian, a unified liberal-left opposition would have been real and powerful, unlike today's liberal-vs-left split opposition.

  • Isi Breen [06-09]

    Has anyone written an article about how Abundance is a swan song for Obama's presidency? That it's less about doing anything new and more about getting back to the last time it seemed like the party had its shit together?

    Problem here is how can anyone still think that the Democrats had their shit together under Obama? He promised "change" and shrunk it down to virtually nothing. He lost Congress after two years, and never won it back, giving him an excuse to do even less than he was inclined to do. Even the articulateness he was famed for before he ran deserted him. (Or was it some kind of race to the bottom with the dumbing down of the American people?) I have dozens of examples, but one specific to "abundance agenda" is that Obama refused to pursue any stimulus projects that weren't "shovel-ready." (Reed Hundt, in A Crisis Wasted, has examples of things proposed but rejected because Obama and his locked-in advisors like Summers and Emmanuel wouldn't consider anything that smacked of long-term planning.)

  • Kate Wehwalt [06-13]:

    It's crazy how in 40 years the internet made everyone stupid and ruined the entire world

    Nah. It just made you more aware of how stupid people already were.

  • Kim, Bestie of Bunzy [06-19]

    Watching this man try to get rid of imaginary raccoons he thought were invading reminds me of what white people are currently trying to do [to] America to get rid [of] immigrants they think are invading

    This comes with a 0:43 video, where the captions read: "My dad had raccoons in his tree house. Nobody has been up there in years. He tried to get rid of them with a combination of . . . smoke bombs and firecrackers. Anxiously watching for fleeing raccoons . . . [the tree house catches fire and is destroyed]. No raccoons were seen or found." Much more of interest in Kim's feed. I didn't expect (i.e., couldn't have imagined) this one:

    Israeli Interior Minister Ben-Gvir accuses Mossad chief Barnea of starting a war: - Why did you provoke Iran! Barnea: - I didn't know Iran had such rocket capabilities!

    The head of Mossad "did not know"

    I've been imagining that Ben-Gvir was the architect of the war, and conjuring up rationales for him doing so. Netanyahu has been complaining about Iran's rockets ever since Israel pivoted against Iran after the 1990 Gulf War neutralized Iraq as Israel's chief bête noire (more like a boogeyman meant to frighten the US and make it subservient to Israel -- a card they've played many times, and which you still see working as US politicians clamor for war against Iran). What this suggests is not that they were unaware of Netanyahu's propaganda, but that neither Ben-Gvir nor Barnea believed Israel's own propaganda, which they both used for their own purposes. Long-range rocket attacks were a significant part of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, with Iraq using Soviet Scuds and Iran building their own (after exhausting their US-built rockets). Extending their range to reach Israel would have been easy, and didn't cross an obvious red line, like nuclear bombs would have. Still, to be a nuclear threat, as Netanyahu has long insisted Iran is, you both need warheads and some way to deliver them: Iranian rockets have always been an obvious part of the equation. (Same for North Korea, which has even larger rockets.) Israel has routinely blamed Iran for every rocket from Gaza, Lebanon, and/or Yemen, so claiming now that you didn't know Iran had "such rocket capabilities" is an admission that you thought the rockets from Gaza, etc., weren't serious threats. They were just propaganda foils.

  • Pessimistic Intellect, Optimistic Will: Includes graphic of a press release by Hakeen Jeffries ("Democratic Leader"). Second and third paragraphs are solid points, although I wouldn't say that the kind of diplomacy the US needs to engage in at the moment is "aggressive": how about "serious"? or "constructive"? or just something that suggests you're not insane? However, before he could allow himself any of that, first Jeffries had to recite his pledge of allegiance:

    Iran is a sworn enemy of the United States and can never be permitted to become a nuclear-capable power. Israel has a right to defend itself against escalating Iranian aggression and our commitment to Israel's security remains ironclad.

    Not only is none of this true, and as articulated is little short of psychotic. Still, the real problem with always putting this pledge first isn't that it suggests you cannot think clearly. It's warning other people that you cannot or will not do anything about Israel's behavior because you're not even in charge of you own thoughts let alone actions.

  • Matthew Yglesias [06-22]:

    Every president of my lifetime except Joe Biden actually started wars, but somehow he ended up getting lambasted from the right and the left for providing military supplies to allies as if that made him the greatest warhawk in American history.

    No one I'm aware of has tried to sort out a ranking of "greatest warhawks in American history," but even if one did, not being the "greatest" wouldn't be much of a compliment. Biden needed not just to not start new wars, but to end them. He not only didn't do the necessary diplomacy to end the wars in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, what diplomacy he did do, combined with his unflinching supply of arms and money to support the war efforts, made it possible for the wars to extend and spread. (Ukraine is slightly different, in that sending arms there can be justified by the need to counter Russian aggression, but also in that there are clear opportunities for diplomatic resolution. Support for Israel, given their long history of aggression and domination, is impossible to justify.) And while you might credit Biden with ending the Afghanistan war, once again he failed to show any diplomatic skill or interest. His popularity sunk not because he ended the war, but due to the ineptness of his withdrawal. The only thing you can say for him is that he was painted into an untenable corner by predecessors, but it's hard to see where he even tried to right their wrongs.

  • Ian Boudreau [06-26] Responding to a tweet noting that "mamdani's win has made the ny times, the washington post, fox news, trump, third way, and the democratic establishment very mad" citing a Washington Post Editorial Board article: "Zohran Mamdani's victory is bad for New York and the Democratic Party: New York cannot take its greatness for granted. Mismanagement can ruin it."

    Wow, mismanagement of New York City - what a genuinely terrifying prospect! Siri who is the current mayor of New York City?

    I don't have the bandwidth to deal with what looks to Wichita like a remote mayoral primary, but is obviously big news for the media centers and for the electorally-oriented left. It's quite possible that left candidates are much better at articulating problems and proposing solutions than they are at administering and implementing, but couldn't that just as easily be due to the obstacles entrenched powers can throw into the way, including their cozy relationship with the establishment press? One thing for sure is that whatever management skills conservatives think they have aren't helped by the evils of their ideology.

    Jamelle Bouie adds: "i think i would take the hysteria over mamdani's ability to govern more seriously if half these people hasn't endorsed eric adams."

    Ryan Cooper quotes Paul Krugman: "centrist Democrats often urge leftier types to rally behind their nominees in general elections. I agree. Anyone claiming that there's no difference between the parties is a fool. But this deal has to be reciprocal."

  • Don Winslow [06-28]:

    16 million Americans are about to lose their health insurance because 77 million Americans voted for this shit.

Mid-Year Music Lists: I usually collect these under Music Week, but it's probably easier here.

Current count: 146 links, 12549 words (14967 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 21 days ago, on May 14.

I started this shortly after the last one, but added very little to it during the last week of May, before trying to wrap it up on June 3 (bleeding into June 4). Rereading the older material led to some editing and expansion, while the latter material is as slapdash and disorganized as ever, and I'm undoubtedly leaving more scraps on the table than I can possibly deal with in the moment.

PS: Posting this Wednesday afternoon, without the "index to major articles" or postscript, which I may try to add later. More loose tabs still open, and I'm finding more all the time, but I desperately need to break off and do some other work, and keep this from becoming an infinite time sink.

Index of major articles below (* for extended -- multi-paragraphs and/or sublist; ** for lots more; this is especially useful if you want to link to a specific section):

Ben Smith [04-27] The group chats that changed America. Evidently there's a whole world of private group chats dominated by billionaires -- Mark Andreessen's name keeps popping up -- where the affairs of the world are being hashed out (e.g., Group chats rule the world), far removed from public political discourse. Should we be surprised that these people are mostly fatuous assholes, with their experience of the world completely removed from almost everyone's daily life?

Jill Lepore [04-28] A Hundred Classics to Get Me Through a Hundred Days of Trump: "Each morning before the day's decree, I turn to a slim book, hoping for sense, or solace." I'm not sure that the framing of short, classic books helps much, although any connection to the known world could have helped one get through the days. But the history of those 100 days seemed pretty well thought out, until I got to this:

Trump won the Presidency in a free and fair election with a mandate to curb inflation, restrict immigration, cut taxes, support small businesses, and reverse progressive overreach, especially in employment and education. From his first day in office, he set about dismantling much of both the federal government and the Constitution's system of checks and balances. By declarations of national emergency, by executive order, and by executive action -- and frequently in plain violation of the Constitution -- Trump gutted entire departments of the federal government. He defied the federal judiciary. He rescinded funds lawfully appropriated by Congress. He lifted regulations across industries. He fired, forced the resignations of, or eliminated the jobs of tens of thousands of federal employees. He hobbled scientific research. He all but criminalized immigration. He denounced the arts. He abandoned the federal government's commitment to public education. He revoked civil rights and shuttered civil-rights programs, deriding the goals of racial equality, gender equality, and L.G.B.T.Q. equality. He made enemies of American allies, and prostituted the United States to the passions of tyrants. He punished his adversaries and delighted in their suffering. He tried to bring universities to heel. He bent law firms to his will. He instituted tariffs and toppled markets; he lifted tariffs and toppled markets. He debased the very idea of America. He created chaos, emergency after emergency.

Trump felled so much timber not because of the mightiness of his axe but because of the rot within the trees and the weakness of the wood. Many of the institutions Trump attacked, from the immigration system to higher education, were those whose leaders and votaries knew them to be broken and yet whose problems they had failed to fix, or even, publicly, to acknowledge. Now is not the time to admit to these problems, leaders -- from Democratic Party officials to C.E.O.s, intellectuals, university presidents, and newspaper editors -- had advised, for years, because this is an emergency. They refused to denounce the illiberalism of speech codes, the lack of due process in the #MeToo movement and Title IX cases, mandatory D.E.I. affirmations as a condition of employment, and the remorseless political intolerance of much of the left. Even after Trump won reëlection on a promise to destroy those institutions, they refused to admit to their problems, presumably because his victory made the emergency even emergencier.

This starts off ok, although "free and fair" aren't the first words I'd choose to describe the 2024 election. And while Trump had campaigned on that issue list, his promises were rarely more specific than "Trump will fix it." Sure, a lot of people placed blind faith in his leadership, but nearly as many recoiled from the prospect in horror. If by mandate you mean popular support for his actual policies, that's quite a stretch. The second half of the first paragraph does provide a nice thumbnail sketch of what he actually did, but it was virtually all by executive fiat, and cost him a good 5 points in approval rating.

The second half goes awry with the list of "leaders," which could be designated the Establishment Democrats. While it is certainly true that they refused to admit some obvious problems -- the main ones I would group as Inequality and War -- they seemed pretty satisfied with the status quo, and campaigned on keeping things as they currently were, or were going. The word "emergency" causes much confusion here. They used the word to gain a bit of legal leverage to go around an obstructionist Congress that they couldn't win and hold, partly due to gerrymandering but mostly due to poor political messaging. On the other hand, Trump used the word to describe a purely imaginary existential terror, which only he can fix because only he can right the propaganda machine that sold the idea to the gullible masses, but which he has little intention of fixing once he discovered the extra powers presidents can claim during "emergencies."

Still, where does the second half of the second paragraph come from? So we're going to blame the failure of the Establishment Democrats to defend their ivory towers and executive suites from Trumpian chaos on "the remorseless political intolerance of much of the left"? The left has never been in any position to dictate establishment policy. If they bought into #MeToo or D.E.I., it's because they had their own reasons. Perhaps they saw them as sops to the left, or to the people the left tries to advocate for? Or maybe they were just diversions from the more important matters of Inequality and War, which produced much of the rot Trump is inadvertently disrupting.

For what it's worth, I don't especially disagree with the anti-woke critique, just with the blame heaped on the left for pushing the anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, etc., lines too far. If for some reason the powers-that-be overreact and "cancel" some racist/sexist/whatever jerk, why do we have to be the ones condemning illiberalism and demanding due process? Why do we have to pull our punches and defend free speech for Nazis? (And note that the ACLU actually does that, as that is their mission, and most of us support them for that.) I'm open to engaging in the left's perpetual practice of self-criticism, but sure, I can get a bit squirmish when admonished for the same faults by smarmy liberals, and even more so by outright fascists, possibly because they find it impossible to criticize the left without projecting their own sense of superiority.

But while much of what Trump has done in his first (and by no means his last) 100 days should be simply and resolutely undone, I wouldn't advise reflexively undoing everything. I don't doubt that there are bureaucrats who shouldn't be taken back, and dead wood programs that we're better off without, as well as much more that would benefit from a fresh rethink. I wouldn't rush to restore DEI programs, but I would restore the DOJ Civil Rights Division's enforcement budget, and encourage them to be more vigilant. I doubt you can undo his pardons, but you could add some more to spread out the effect: we should be more generous in forgiving those who trespass against us. And while I can't point to any even inadvertent blessings from Trump's foreign policy shake up, that's one area where a Biden restoration shouldn't even be contemplated.

At some point, it might be interesting to take Lepore's essay and strip it down to the plain history, skipping all of the Swift and Coleridge and Whitman fluff. Even knowing it's happened, such plain words are likely to still be sobering, shocking even. Lepore's idea may be that we can always look back to civilization. But perhaps civilization isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Scott Lemieux [05-04] Thelma and Louise economics: Starts with a long quote from Maia Mindel [05-01] Check Your Exorbitant Privilege!, which includes the Thelma & Louise ending scene video, in case you need that reference explained. Lemieux adds: "The biggest problem with Trump's trade war is that it's based on nostalgia for something that can't be reconstructed." And he ends with Trump: "We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we're essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we're saving hundreds of billions of dollars. It's very simple."

Brad Luen [05-04] Top 50 albums of the Fifties: The jazz list here is so good I'm hard-pressed to supplement it. The pop and rock, country and blues hit the obvious high points with best-ofs limited to 1950s releases (some since superseded; Lefty Frizzell is an obvious omission). The Latin and "Old World" lists give me something to work on.

Mitch Therieau [05-06] Can Spotify Be Stopped? Which raises, but doesn't answer, the question of why should it be stopped? I'm pretty skeptical of tech giants, but I subscribe to Spotify, and it gives me pretty good value. There are things about it that I don't like, and there is much more I just haven't taken the trouble to understand. I could imagine something much better, but most of the complaints I hear have to do with shortchanging artists and labels, and I don't really see that as my problem, or even as much of an economic problem. This is a review of Liz Pelly's book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

Nate Weisberg [05-06] Inside the Trump Assault on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: "An agency lawyer and union representative opens up about the Trump/Musk rampage on the CFPB, what happens next, and why he's still optimistic." I think it's hard for people to recognize the extent to which the Trump administration has not only turned a blind eye to fraud and other white collar crime but has actively promoted it.

Samuel O'Brient [05-10] Bill Gates' major decision draws shocking response: He's says he's not only going to give away his fortune, but dissolve his foundation within 20 years. I've had very little kind of even nice to say about him or his company -- at least since 1984, when they had a good chance to hire me but passed because, like Trump, they "only hire the best people," and explicitly decided I wasn't one. But I'll save those sour grapes for the memoir. The Windows monopoly came later, as it was barely a demo program at the time: both the technical decisions that made it crappy software, and the business dictates that turned it into a profitable monopoly. So I've always viewed his philanthropy as whitewashing blood money. But dissolving his fortune shows a sensibility to human limits I never gave him credit for, one that appears to be as rare in high tech these days as it was a century ago among the Rockefellers and Mellons of yore. More radical still is the idea of dissolving a foundation, a major loophole in estate tax law that encouraged moguls to leave permanent monuments to themselves. I've long felt that foundations should be required to dispense all of their net income plus a fixed percentage of their endowment each year, so that they have limited lifetimes.

Joshua Schwartz [05-12] The hidden costs of Trump's 'madman' approach to tariffs: "The downsides of his trade policies are symptoms of a larger strategic flaw." Much to think about here, but my initial thoughts settle on how much I hate game theory. The madman theory assumes that your opponent is more rational than you are -- or at least is rational enough to avoid catastrophe -- so why can't you just reason with them and work out something sensible? And why make it some kind of contest of estimated power, when you know that even winning that game is at best temporary as the loss creates resentment that will eventually come back to bite you?

Jacob Hacker/Paul Pierson [05-13] How the economic and political geography of the United States fuels right-wing populism -- and what the Democratic Party can do about it. The authors have written a number of worthy books on American politics, including (at least these are the ones I've read and can recommend): Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005); The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement (2007); Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (2010); American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (2016); Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequalilty (2020). This will probably turn into another one, but it's going to take some more work. I think the "density divide" is a mostly illusory artifact of other factors. (Democrats have gotten very bad at talking to anyone other than well-educated pan-urban liberals.) Even more inexplicable is "plutocratic populism." What passes for "right-wing populism" these days is basically the substitution of false issues for real ones. That Republicans can get away with this is partly due to their clever efforts, but also to the Democrats' chronic ineptitude at talking about real issues and exposing and deflecting the nonsense they face. Also from this group:

Sharon Zhang [05-13] DNC Moves to Oust David Hogg After He Says Party Isn't Standing Up to Trump. He's 28, and has made the DNC nervous by organizing a PAC calling for primarying against ineffective elders, so they approved a complaint from a 61-year-old woman who lost, citing the election as a violation of the party's "gender parity" rules. (Why do Democrats have rules that are so easily lampooned?) They also voided the election of Malcolm Kenyatta to a vice-chair slot, who seems to be less controversial but collateral damage.

Nathan J Robinson [05-14] The Myth of the Marxist University: "Academia is not full of radicals. There just aren't many Republicans, perhaps because Republicans despise the academy's values of open-mindedness and critical inquiry." I don't feel like really sinking into this, but I could probably write a ton. One thing is that in the early 1970s, I actually did have significant exposure to explicitly Marxist academics: there were a half-dozen in just the sociology department at Washington University, and a few more I knew of in other departments. That was an anomaly, and the Danforths were already moving to dismantle the sociology department when I left. They fired my main professor there, Paul Piccone, and as far as I know never got another academic posting. I knew a few more Marxists elsewhere, mostly through Piccone, and many of them had a rough time, despite being very worthy scholars. Marxists had two strikes against them: one was that they were on the wrong side politically, as universities have traditionally been finishing schools for the upper class (a role they've largely reverted to, not least by making them unaffordable to the masses); and secondly, they demanded critical thinking, which made them not just subversive, but smarter than more conventional thinkers. I can't quite claim that there's no such thing as a dogmatic Marxist -- many academics in the Soviet Union were just that, and ridiculous as a result -- but most of us saw Marxism not as an ideology but as a step on the way towards better understanding the world (and sure, of changing it for a better future.

Since my day, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there seems to have been a concerted effort to poison the wells and salt the earth of academia to deny any sort of legitimacy to Marxian thought -- a campaign effective enough that even Robinson, who isn't afraid of declaring himself a socialist, shies away from admitting any sort of Marxist sympathies. In some ways this doesn't matter. While the Marxian toolkit is exceptionally powerful, there are many ways to get to the truth of a matter. But we should recognize that the right's agenda isn't just to stamp out a heresy. It is to shut down critical thought, and turn the universities back into a system for training cadres who accept and cherish the inequalities and injustices of the present system. Understanding Marxism will hobble their agenda, but even if one remains ignorant of Marx and his followers, inequality and injustice will drive a good many people to resist, to question, to research, and ultimately to reinvent the tools they need to defend themselves.

Some more Current Affairs:

Marci Shore/Timothy Snyder/Jason Stanley [05-14] We Study Fascism, and We're Leaving the U.S.: Three Yale historians pack up and leave Trumpland, in what looks less like a principled stand than a book promotion -- I'm not familiar with Shore (a specialist in Polish and Ukrainian intellectual history), but I've read books by Snyder (The Road to Unfreedom) and Stanley (How Fascism Works), and consider them useful (although, like most "threat to democracy" alarms, they fail to consider how little actual democracy they have left to defend -- a better book to read on this is Astra Taylor's Democracy May Not Exist but We'll Miss It When It's Gone).

I've pondered the fascism question quite a bit, and have no doubt that there are common ideas and attitudes among Trump and other Republicans, which become genuinely perilous when given power -- as has happened with Trump's election, and with his subsequent power grabs. When we look for historical insights, it is hard not to recall the early days of fascism: while the differences are considerable, few other analogies convey the gravity of what's happening, or the consequences should it continue.

David Klion [05-15] I Thought David Horowitz Was a Joke -- but He Foreshadowed the Trump Coalition: I wrote about Horowitz's obituary last time, but I figured this article is worth citing anew. One thing that could use a deeper look is the hustle that moved him into a position of prominence (editor at Ramparts) on the new left, and which found much more lucrative support when he moved to the far right (e.g., his son as Marc Andreessen's VC fund partner). Of course, it's not just hustle. More than that it's the ability to make yourself instrumental for people with the power to make you rich.

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [05-16] Roaming Charges: Sturm und Drang Warnings. Opens with a flurry of videos of ICE agents brutally attacking "suspects." Then there's "Trump grants white South Africans refugee status," with a picture that prompted Julie K Brown to quip, "I've never seen refugees with so much luggage." Much more, including this:

    There's not a single Congressional district where the support for slashing Medicare is more than 15%. Of course, this doesn't matter to MAGA. Unlike the Democrats, they sought power in order to use it, especially for malign unpopular policies, and they don't fret about the future political consequences. Imagine a party who won power and then fulfilled their promises for englightened popular policies, instead of worrying how it might piss off Wall Street?

    Of course, there is no such party. The Democrat establishment is Wall Street's first line of defense against any policy agenda that might restraint capital and/or redistribute wealth, regardless of how popular such programs might be.

  • [05-23] Roaming Charges: White Lies About White Genocide: Starts with Richard Burton (more likely the 19th century imperialist explorer than the Welsh actor): "The more I study religions, the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself."

  • [05-30] When the Dead Speak and the Living Refuse to Listen. Emphasis added:

    The problem with writing about Gaza is that words can't explain what's happening in Gaza. Neither can images, even the most gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. Because what needs to be explained is the inexplicable. What needs to be explicated is the silence in the face of horror.

    Israel has been brazenly upfront about its plans to subdue Gaza, depopulate it of Palestinians, and seize the Strip for itself. Israel will not change. It hasn't deviated from this genocidal course since October 8, 2023. For 19 months, every Palestinian has been a target because Israel wants Gaza cleansed of Palestinians. Therefore, everyone can be bombed. Everyone can be starved. Everyone can be denied medical care and the mere essentials of life.

    I would have added to the second bold bit, "and no one else can change it." Or maybe I mean "will," but the distinction between "can't" and "won't" isn't likely to be tested.

Maureen Dowd [05-17] The Tragedy of Joe Biden: Talk about "loose tabs": a horrible piece, open way too long, as I was thinking of tucking it in under some of those Jake Tapper book reviews that I must still have open somewhere. [PS: Have since added a few, but not a full reckoning.]

  • Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson [05-13] How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump: "At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden's weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?" This is a chunk from their book.

  • James Kirchick [05-20] All the President's Enablers: "Three books on Joe Biden's presidency jointly paint a devastating portrait of an ailing, geriatric leader surrounded by mendacious aides and grasping family members." Review of Tapper's book, along with the campaign tomes by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (Fight) and by Chris Whipple (Uncharted) -- how weird that both books include "Wildest" in their subtitles?

  • Jennifer Szalai [05-13] A Damning Portrait of an Enfeebled Biden Protected by His Inner Circle: A review of Tapper's Original Sin, which "depicts an aging president whose family and aides enabled his quixotic campaign for a second term."

  • Ravi Hari [05-14] Joe Biden's memory lapses sparked concern among aides, new book reveals.

  • Michelle Goldberg [05-16] How Did So Many Elected Democrats Miss Biden's Infirmity?

  • Benjamin Hart [05-22] Jake Tapper Dissects Bidenworld's 'Big Lie': An interview with Tapper. One tidbit here is about how Mike Donilon, who seems to be the most culpable person in Biden's entourage, made about $4 million on failed campaign.

  • Andrew Rawnsley [05-22] Who's to blame for the Biden tragedy?

  • John Koblin [05-23] Everyone Now Has an Opinion on Jake Tapper: "A book the CNN host co-wrote has received positive reviews and appears to be a sales hit. But it also has generated intense scrutiny of him and his work."

  • Scott Lemieux [05-24] Joe Biden winning the 2020 nomination was probably suboptimal, but it was not an elite conspiracy: Evidently Tapper is pushing the line that it was. Looking at the list of candidates and their money suggests that something screwy was going on, especially with the donors (two of whom spent lavishly and ruinously on themselves).

  • Lloyd Green: [05-25] Original Sin: How Team Biden wished away his decline until it was too late.

  • Carlos Lozada [05-20] Biden Is a Scapegoat. The Democrats Are the Problem. Of course it is. It's always "THE DEMOCRATS." Even though straw polls often show generic Democrats beating generic Republicans, when actual Democrats lose, it's always the fault of "THE DEMOCRATS." There's such a mismatch between what they say and what they actually do, that it's hard not to suspect them of deceit, corruption, ulterior motives, and sheer sophistry. For some reason Republicans manage to avoid or belittle such suspicions, even while engaging in much more egregious misbehavior -- for some reason that seems to build up their brand as badass action figures, while for all of their behind-the-scenes machinations, supposedly brilliant Democratic operatives keep squandering tons of cash and losing elections that should be easy.

  • Norman Solomon [05-13] The Careerism That Enabled Biden's Reelection Run Still Poisons the Democratic Party: Original Sin "reveals top White House aides lying to journalists and trying to gaslight the public over Biden's decline." What should also be clear is that journalists sleepwalked through all four Biden years: they were blinded by naive bipartisanship, allowing Republicans to drive the few stories they bothered with, which meant that they constantly sniped at Democrats over bullshit (which did include Biden's age)) while ignoring real problems, like war and inequality, that Biden was helpless at, or in some cases simply uninterested in.

  • Stanley B Greenberg [05-29] The Real Original Sins: "What do Democrats need to do to win back voters' trust?"

  • Branko Marcetic [05-23] Will Democrats Learn From the Biden Disaster? Probably Not. Author wrote the only serious (not just left, which counts for a lot) pre-2020 election book on Biden (Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden) and has covered him extensively as president, so I expected him at least to review Original Sin, and was surprised how hard this piece was to find. As he points out, "In hindsight, many of the most cynical theories about what was going on in the Biden White House turned out to be true." And: "The careerism, elite myopia, and poor judgment that led the party establishment to run an ailing man the entire country could see was plainly unfit to be president don't seem to have gone anywhere."

  • New Republic:

    • Michael Tomasky [05-19] What the Democrats Need to Learn From the Biden Cover-Up Fiasco: "As much as covering up the president's infirmity was a scandal for all involved, the Democrats' mortal sin was the one that was right out in the open." Which one? Presumably the Harris succession, which was consecrated with hardly a whiff of debate, locked in (like so much in the Democratic Party) by the donor elite, who didn't dare risk running a candidate with ideas of proven popularity.

    • Alex Shephard [05-21] Was It Really a "Cover-Up" if We All Knew the Truth About Biden? I think he's wrong here. Nobody knew the truth, possibly including Biden. How could they? Biden was sheltered, with his inconsistencies and lapses explained away by people in a position to know better, but influenced by political exigencies they never acknowledged. In this void, Republicans spread all sorts of charges and innuendos, which lacked credibility because they're extremely biased liars -- as was obvious from every charge based on policy differences. The problem was that Biden's people got caught in their competency lie, which not only discredited them but gave Republicans credit for their whole kit and caboodle. Nor was competency the only lie Democrats got trapped by: ending the war in Gaza was the big one, but there were dozens more, especially their crowing about how great the economy was when some factors were hitting many people hard (like high interest rates).

    • Osita Nwanevu [05-23] The Democrats Are Having a False Reckoning Over Joe Biden: "Party elites aer considerably more responsible for their woeful state of affairs than the former president." Probably true, but he is their leader, and his reputation in tatters exposes their own desperation and malfeasance.

PS [06-10] In my initial compilation of the above reviews, I hoped to find some left critiques, which I expected would minimize the personal -- Biden's "infirmity" and the fickleness of his aides -- and instead focus on the administration's deeper failure to recognize and react to voter discontent. I even expected this would go overboard in stressing policy disagreements -- we do after all care a lot about policy -- the most obvious recognition/reaction would have been to admit to problems but blame most of them on Republicans and the much broader corruption that has kept honest and caring Democrats from implementing even the most modest of reforms. One might go on to point out that Biden has turned out to be one of the weakest links in the defense of Democracy, due to his lame communication skills, his checkered and opportunistic past, and his lack of empathy. But, sure, those are just talking points someone like me could rattle off without ever opening the book. What I suspect reading the book might add is details about how president, aides, donors, lobbyists, and the media interact, especially given the problem of a marginally incompetent central figure who many are inclined to defer to and to pamper like a monarch. (Needless to point out, the same dynamics are already evident in the Trump administration, where the bias towards destruction and chaos makes incompetence and intemperance a greater threat, and therefore a more urgent lesson.)

However, aside from Solomon, I didn't find much. So I tried to get more explicit, and googled "left critique of jake tapper original sin." That kicked off the AI engine, which suggests that AI (chez Google, at least) has little clue who or what the left is, what we think, or why we care. Rather, they come up with this list of "common points of contention" (I'm numbering and condensing their wording slightly; brackets for my reactions):

  1. Bias and Perspective: presents a biased, negative view of Biden, possibly due to Tapper's own politics [why not just to flog a dead horse to sell more books? does Tapper have any politics that might overrule self-interest?]
  2. Focus on Decline: which could be seen as unfair or overly critical, by those who support Biden's policies and leadership [on the other hand, denial of the obvious was seen by opponents as proof of the Democrats' bad faith and hypocrisy, which ultimately did more harm]
  3. Lack of Nuance: fails to acknowledge Biden's accomplishments [given how little difference nuance makes, this just comes off as sour grapes; is it even true? the easiest thing in the world would be to concede that Biden did some good things while failing at others]
  4. Emphasis on Negative Aspects: focus on "cover-up" and his "disastrous choice" to run again is over-exaggerated [so the author is accused of hyping his book?]
  5. Misrepresentation of Facts: the book misrepresents or misinterprets certain facts or event so support its narrative [something all books do to present a coherent argument, and all reviewers who reject the argument carp on]
  6. Impact on Democratic Party: the negative portrayal of Biden could be harmful to the Democratic Party, especially if it discourages voters [as compared to the harm that not reporting this story has already done?]

I've added a few more reviews (Hari, Rawnsley, Green, Greenberg) to the section. We now have the extra perspective provided by the 2024 election results, after which Biden has become historically disposable, although for some still useful as a scapegoat. Several reviews quote David Plouffe complaining Biden "totally fucked us." None seem eager to point out that Plouffe, "senior adviser to the Harris campaign," fucked us as well.

Nicholas Kristoff [05-17] The $7 Billion We Wasted Bombing a Country We Couldn't Find on a Map: The price tag comes from Yemen Data Project and Defense Priorities. Given the multi-trillion dollar price tags on Iraq and Afghanistan, this number seems like a pittance. While the cruelty, waste, and ineffectiveness are obvious, I don't get why any journalists would write like this:

I understand American skepticism about humanitarian aid for Yemeni children, for the Houthis run an Iran-backed police state with a history of weaponizing aid. Yet our campaign of bombing and starvation probably strengthens the Houthis, making their unpopular regime seem like the nation's protectors while driving them closer to Iran.

How would Kristoff know how unpopular the Houthis are? They must have some kind of popular base, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to displace the Saudi- and American-backed police state that they overthrew. As for their alliance with Iran, what other option did we give them? And would Iran be such a problem if we weren't so obsessed with cutting Iran off and pushing them away?

Dave DeCamp [05-19] Trump's 'Golden Dome' Missile Shield Expected to Cost $500 Billion: That's a wild guess that nobody believes. The only chance it has of working is if no one tests it. The cost of a working system is unimaginable, because any conceivable system can just as easily be circumvented, and anticipating how many ways, and handling all of them, adds orders of magnitude to the cost. Israel's Iron Dome works because Israel is small, and has weak enemies, with primitive technology. Even so, to say it "works" is pretty generous, given Oct. 7, 2023. (If it worked so well then, why is Israel still at war 18 months later? I know, "rhetorical question"! They're at war to kill Palestinians and render Gaza uninhabitable, and the attack was just an excuse for something they wanted to do anyway. In this context, Iron Dome may have helped sucker Hamas into an attack that was more a gesture of unhappiness than a serious attempt to hurt Israel.)

Taking Iron Dome and gold-plating it isn't going to make it work better (but it will make it more expensive, which is largely the point to advisers like Elon Musk). Reagan's Star Wars plan in the 1980s never turned into anything more than graft, and there's no reason to expect more here. The waste is orders of magnitude beyond insane, but worse than that is the attitude it presents to the rest of the world: we dare you to attack us, for which we will show you no mercy, because we really don't care how many of you we kill to "defend ourselves." Every time I see something like this, I recall the scenario laid out in one of Chalmer Johnson's books, where he talks about how easy it would be for someone like China to put "a dumptruck full of gravel" on top of a rocket and blast it into low earth orbit, destroying all of America's communications satellites -- which would wipe out much of our internet service, weather forecasting, GPS, and pretty much all of the command and control systems the US depends on for power projection around the globe. That wouldn't make it possible for China to conquer America, let alone to replace the US as "global hegemon," but it would undermine America's capability to fight wars in China's vicinity. That was all with technology China had 20 years ago. Note that North Korea, which the US has given much less reason to be cautious, has that same technology today. But someone like Trump is going to think that a Golden Dome protects him from such threats, so he's safe from having to make any peace gestures. After all, look at how much peace the Iron Dome gave to Israel.

Kyle Chan [05-19]: In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The US Will Be Irrelevant. Dean Baker recommended this "very good piece," adding "it's not good for the home team. Trump's loony fantasies are not a way forward." Chan is a Princeton-based expert on "technology and industrial policy in China," so he's looking for nail he can hammer. China has a real industrial policy, and while it's tolerated quite a bit of inequality, it's ultimately rooted in a civic desire to raise the entire country out of poverty and into everyday wealth. The US has no such policy, nor for that matter much civic desire. Chomsky summed up the American system succinctly: one where profits are privatized, while liabilities are socialized. That reduces all of us to marks, where entrepreneurs (and mobsters) are free to rob everyone (even each other) blind. When Trump became president, he didn't change from private taking to public service. He just realized that being president gives him leverage to take even more, and unlike his predecessors, he has no scruples to get in his way. (Also that his courts have promised him immunity, although one wonders how much he can flaunt this being-above-the-law thing?)

The issue I have with this piece is the concept of "dominant," and for that matter the horse race illustration, which seems like a lot of projection. What China can and will do is reduce a lot of the dominance the US has long exercised over the global economy and its politics -- including the part known as "exorbitant privilege." What China cannot do is to replace us and become the same kind of "global hegemon" the US has been. Americans can't conceive of a world without a ruler, so they assume that if they lose power, it must be to someone else -- someone less benign than we are.

The US gained its power during WWII, when its economy, planned and directed by the most socialist government in American history, blossomed, producing widespread prosperity for most Americans, while the rest of the world was reduced to ruins. That disparity couldn't last, but as long as the US didn't abuse its power -- and at first its "open door" policies were much preferable to the old colonial extracters -- many nations were inclined to follow along. The main problems came when countries tried to assert their independence, especially if they ran afoul of America's championing of capital, with or without any form of democracy. The nations we habitually describe as enemies are mostly struggling for independence.

PS: Consider this chart from a Richard D Wolff [06-02] tweet, which shows "GLobal average net favorability of the US and China, which a decade ago was running pretty steady with the US around +20 and China around -7, but the US rating sunk fast with Trump to -1.5, while China has improved to +8.8.

Jodie Adams Kirshner [05-20] The Sun Sets on West Virginia's Green-Energy Future: "President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act was finally bringing jobs and industry back to the state. But not for long." The picture here shows Trump grinning with a couple other suits, backed by grim men in hard hats -- presumably coal miners -- and flags. Even if Trump manages to bring coal back, and the economics of that are unlikely, they will do so with automation instead of workers, few of whom will benefit. West Virginia's flip to the Republicans is sad and pathetic.

Theodore Schliefer [05-20]: Democrats Throw Money at a Problem: Countering GOP Clout Online: This is probably true, up to a point:

Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump's victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.

This mentions some projects vying for donors: Chorus, AND Media, Channel Zero, Project Echo, Double Tap Democracy. And notes that one was founded by "Rachel Irwin, who led a $30 million influencer program last cycle for Future Forward, the biggest Democratic super PAC." I'd love to see a full accounting of the $1B-plus that the Harris campaign burned through to such underwhelming effect. My guess is that tons of money have already been spent along these lines, to very little effect, largely because the donor-friendly messaging was didn't gain any traction with voters. Perhaps the donors themselves are the problem, and we'd be better off with shoestring-funded grass roots projects which at least have some integrity?

This piece came to my attention via Nathan J Robinson, who suggested putting some of that money into his magazine, Current Affairs, "if you genuinely want to build media that effectively challenges the right and is not just telling Democrats what they want to hear." (Which, by the way, is definitively not today's lead article: Lily Sánchez [05-19] We Still Need to Defund and Abolish the Police. What we really need is some better way to make the police work for us, to solve our problems, and one thing for sure is that requires some funding -- not necessarily for the things we currently fund, but something. "Defund the police" is a joke hiding behind a slogan, but damn few people are likely to go for the slogan, and the joke isn't even very funny -- least of all to people who are routinely victimized by crime, which if you count fraud is pretty much everyone. What they're basically saying is that the police are so dysfunctional you could get rid of them and wouldn't be worse off.)

But Robinson is right: the left press gives you much more bang for the buck than the grant-chasing opportunists who try to pawn themselves off as consultants. Politics today is much more about who you fear and hate than who you like let alone what you want. Republicans understand this, so they fund all manner of right-wing craziness, even when they get embarrassing, because they turn lots of people against Democrats, and they know two things: they can use that energy, and they don't need to fear that it will go too far, because they're convinced they can control it. (Granted, they are not always right, Hitler being a case in point.)

But Democrats don't get this: first, they fear the left, perhaps even more than they fear the right (e.g., Bloomberg spent $500M to stop Sanders, but only $25M to support Harris over Trump); and second, they don't see the value in using the left against the right (possibly because they think their muddled programs, like ACA, by virtue of being more "centrist," have broader appeal than something like Medicare for All, or maybe just because they don't dare offending their donors). To some extent they are right: media bias is such that Hillary Clinton was seen as more dishonest and more corrupt than Donald Trump, but it's hard to fight that with candidates as dishonest and corrupt as the Clintons.

The only Democrat who realized he could use the left was Franklin Roosevelt. He saw unions as a way to organize Democratic voters, but he also thought that capitalism could survive a more equitable distribution of profits, and that the nation as a whole would be better that way. Meanwhile, union leaders like John L Lewis saw that communists were among his best organizers, so he used them as well, while cutting deals that fell far short of revolution. All that went out with the Red Scare, since which liberals have been much more concerned with distancing themselves from the left than from the right -- even though the "democratic wing of the Democratic Party" has always been happy to fall in line behind their modest corporate-blessed reform efforts (while the trans-Democratic left has, since FDR's day, been vanishingly marginal).

The one thing Trump might be good for is to finally bury the hatchet between pragmatic Democrats and the more idealistic left. We need both. We need the left to push us to do good things. We need the pragmatists to figure out ways do them that don't provoke counterproductive backlash.[*] And both, but especially the left, need to expose the right for what they are, in terms so clear that no one can deny their truth.

[*] Note that they don't have a very good track record on this. Even after they got all of the affected lobbyists to sign off on Obamacare, severely limiting the system, Republicans generated a huge backlash just to exploit the political opportunity.

Andrew Day [05-20] Cut Israel Off — for Its Own Sake: There are lots of good reasons for taking this position. Even American Conservatives can do it. Even people who seriously love Israel and care for little else are coming around. That just leaves the mass murderers in Israel, their paranoid, brainwashed and/or just plain racist cohort, and their sentimental fools -- probably not paranoid, but brainwashed and/or racist, for sure -- in the west. More Israel, and here I'm more concerned with the growing sense of futility than with the daily unveiling of more atrocities (for some atrocities, look further down):

  • Ori Goldberg [05-12] Israel Is Spiraling: "The government's genocidal fervor is ripping through the carefully constructed layers of self-delusion that power this country."

  • Kenn Orphan [05-21] Palestine is the litmus test for every value the West holds dear. "And we are failing miserably."

  • Yakov M Rabkin: [06-03] Will Israelis Repent for Gaza Genocide? Re-Humanization Takes Courage.

    Jewish tradition teaches that it is never too late to change course, to repent, and to make amends. Of course, to make such a sharp turn requires courage. A well-known Jewish insight is quite clear about it: "Who is the greatest of all heroes? He who turns an enemy into a friend." Most people in Israel vehemently reject as "exilic" this traditional Jewish wisdom that upholds peace as the supreme value. They see in it only "comfort of the weak." But, in fact, this is what real strength is all about.

  • Taya Bero [06-01] Why is a pro-Israel group asking the US to investigate Ms Rachel? I never heard of her before I started seeing tweets highlighting her Gaza statements, but evidently she's a big deal in some quarters. While the Trump administration hopes to chill free speech across the entire opposite political spectrum (see Magarian below), Israel is the one subject that has already moved to active suppression. It's tempting to say that's because it's the hardest to make light of.

    Not that this particular government has any scruples about banning speech, assembly, or anything else they find disobedient.

  • Melody Ermachild Chavis: [06-02] Gaza's Destruction Injures Israel Forever: Maybe it seems perverse to focus on the self-harm Israel is responsible for, when there are much more obvious victims -- vast numbers of Palestinians, of course, but also a few widely scattered Jews who get caught up in blowback or (at least as likely) "friendly fire."

    Some Israeli soldiers have themselves tried for years to warn of exactly what I am pointing out. Former soldiers founded the NGO Breaking the Silence, which has published testimony of Israeli soldiers revealing the brutal ways the occupation is sustained. Today, they are saying that if anyone thinks they are being a friend to Israel by defending its actions in Gaza or by staying silent, they are not. Friends don't let friends commit war crimes.

    Eventually, every war ends. And when this one ends, Israel's young men and women will return from combat bringing with them the wounds we can see and those that cannot easily be seen. They, and Israel, will be changed forever.

  • Ibrahim Quraishi [06-02]: "These Could Be Our Children:" Israeli Women Opposing the War, an Interview.

  • Gary Fields [06-03] Never Again?

    It is now imperative to acknowledge what people of conscience the world over know to be true: The State of Israel is operating a Death Camp for the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. By forcibly confining the Palestinians of Gaza within impassable bounds, while at the same time slaughtering and starving them within this confined space, the State of Israel has made a mockery of the slogan, "Never Again."

Sandeep Vaheesan [05-21] The Real Path to Abundance: "To deliver plentiful housing and clean energy, we have top get the story right about what's standing in the way." Review of Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson: Abundance, in which he finds much to nitpick, before moving on to more general problems. Among the most cutting:

It's not insignificant that Klein and Thompson's attacks echo the Trumpist agenda they disclaim. The affluent undoubtedly have more time and resources to spend advocating for their interests than the poor. But instead of calling for steeper progressive taxation and anti-monopoly policies that would rein in the power of the affluent, Klein and Thompson focus single-mindedly on red tape. Instead of calling for expanded state capacity to expedite environmental reviews (as they do for some government projects, like California's High-Speed Rail Authority), they suggest we should ditch environmental review entirely. And instead of making the case for strengthening and broadening democratic participation in land use policy, they imply we should simply jettison it altogether. . . .

This vision is undemocratic in both form and function. Diminishing public power over land use decisions means greater private control, which in turn means more deference to the whims of the market and more discretion for corporate executives and financiers -- in short, more oligarchy. That is exactly what Trump and Elon Musk are hoping to achieve by taking the chainsaw to federal agencies, and that is why, as Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini puts it, they are "hitting the professional-managerial class -- and hitting them hard." These points of overlap with Trump's agenda also matter politically.

Also related here:

  • Dean Baker [05-27] Why Are the Abundance Boys Scared to Talk About Patent Monopolies? He later expanded this to [06-01]: My Abundance Agenda. Nothing here questions the value of producing more, but stresses that it does make a lot of difference just how you go about doing it.

  • Ed Kilgore [05-29] The Abundance Agenda Revives an Old Democratic Rivalry: "Helping the public sector get tangible things done may be the only way to protect progressive interest and identity groups from MAGA." Huh? This looks like (and he's quoting Jonathan Chait) anti-left Democrat think they've found a cudgel in the "abundance agenda" to beat down the left, who they continue to identify not in class but in identity terms. This assumes two things: that the "abundance agenda" will be massively popular once one has the power to implement it; and that its appeal will be so obvious that Democrats advancing it will be able to win the elections they need to implement it. There is little evidence for either. I agree that Democrats have to promote policies that will attract massive political support, and that once they have the power, they need to deliver substantial tangible benefits. I don't doubt that increasing production is part of the solution, but unless it can produce useful goods and services, and be directed where needed, it's just another scam for supply-side trickle-down.

Greg Grandin [05-22] The Conquest Never Ends: Tie-in to the author's new book, Greg Grandin: America, América: A New History of the New World, which I've just started, but also ties in to Israel's echo of the Conquest in Gaza. Subheds here: "Conquest, Then and Now"; "From Cortés to Hitler"; and "The End of the End of the Age of Conquest," which sees Trump's ambitions to expand American power from Greenland to Panama alongside Israel's clearing of Gaza and Putin's invasion of Ukraine as a deliberate reversal from the decolonization movement that followed the demise of the German and Japanese empires in WWII. Of course, there are differences, not least being that Israel is operating shamelessly in plain sight, but as Grandin points out, the Spanish broke new ground in documenting their destruction and enslavement through the then-novel medium of the printing press.

Also at TomDispatch:

  • William D Hartung/Ashley Gate [05-27] The Coming of a Values-Free Foreign Policy: "Donald Trump has ripped off the human rights veneer that once graced US foreign policy." Or that tried to hide the disgrace of US foreign policy? While on the one hand I'm pleased to cut the hypocrisy, there was something comforting in the thought that Americans felt the need to pretend they were doing good in the world. With Trump, it's all transactional, and much of that is directed into his personal accounts.

  • Alfred McCoy [05-25] How American Soft Power Turned to Dust in the Age of Trump: "Why the world's richest nation is killing the world's poorest children."

  • Juan Cole [05-29] Trump of Arabia: "Is Trump's Axis of the Plutocrats Marginalizing Israel?" I don't see how anyone can doubt that pro-Israel donors are getting their money's worth out of Trump. His support for clearing Gaza out is undoubtable, and he'll probably wind up negotiating a mass evacuation. Similarly, he has no concerns or scruples about whatever Netanyahu wants to do in the occupied West Bank. On the other hand, he seems less inclined than Biden to let Israel dictate his foreign policy beyond Israel's immediate borders. Happy as he is to cash Israeli checks, he realizes that the real money is in oil, and that oil-rich Arabs are eager to grease his skids. There are even rumors that he'll resurrect the Iran nuclear deal he scuttled in his first term. Others have noticed this, although they keep trying to imagine less crass motives:

  • Todd Miller [06-01] Donald Trump's Border World in the Age of Climate Change: "The United States, the world's largest historic carbon emitter, had already been spending 11 times more on border and immigration enforcement than on climate finance and, under President Trump, those proportions are set to become even more stunningly abysmal."

  • Liz Theoharis/Aaron Scott/Moses Hernandez McGavin [06-03]: The Christian Nationalist Mission to Banish Trans People.

Mike Lofgren [05-24] Pete Rose, Donald Trump and the corruption of literally everything: "Our president's meddling in baseball history: Another reminder that he ruins everything he touches." Aside from Rose, the other names are ancient, with only Joe Jackson likely to receive any HOF consideration at all (some other names I recognize: Eddie Cicotte, a near-HOF quality pitcher also part of the Black Sox scandal, as were Happy Felsch, Chick Gandil, Fred McMullin, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver, and Lefty Williams; also: Benny Kauff, Lee Magee, Cozy Dolan; others I didn't recall: Joe Gedeon, Gene Paulette, Jimmy O'Connell, William Cox; I was surprised that Hal Chase was not on the list, but no one in MLB history has been so notoriously corrupt for so long -- probably not HOF caliber, but pretty comparable to a couple others who have been inducted; see Wikipedia for details on these and others). I always hated the way sports writers lionized Rose, so I tended to denigrate him. (I suppose Charlie Parker was another one I underrated because everyone else seemed to overrate him.) If I had to rank Rose, I'd put him somewhere just below Paul Waner, but well above Lloyd Waner. That Trump would favor Rose seems typical of both (sure, I'm less certain that Rose would reciprocate, but I wouldn't rule it out).

  • George F Will [05-15] Pete Rose and Donald Trump, what a double-play combo: Will is categorically wrong on everything in politics, except that he hates Donald Trump, probably for the same reasons Churchill hated Hitler. Will's one saving grace is that he knows a lot about baseball, and writes about it intelligently and well. So when I wanted to compare notes on Rose and Trump, I landed here, where the key line is his description of Rose as "a monster of self-absorption." QED, I'd say.

Kenneth P Vogel [05-27] Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner: "Paul Walczak's pardon application cited his mother's support for the president, including raising millions of dollars and a connection to a plot to publicize a Biden family diary." Add his name to the list of examples "of the [Trump's] willingness to use his clemency powers to reward allies who advance his political causes, and to punish his enemies."

Yasha Levine [05-28] A Letter to My Fellow Jewish Americans: Starts with the killing of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington DC, by a shooter identified as Elias Rodriguez, predictably spun as "a pure act of antisemitism," because what other reason can there be for wanting to strike back at Israel?

So I want to say this to many of my fellow Jews in America: I know you are desperate to justify and deflect your support for Israel's actions. . . . This denial may work on you, but it has little power in the larger world. You've been sheltered for far too long, thinking that you and your children would never bear the cost of your political decisions. But here is the thing: What happened in Washington DC . . . there is a lot more of the same kind of violence coming our way. And it's all your fault. . . . Give up your biblical-nationalist fantasies before it's too late. We all live in one world. We're all connected. Continuing on this path will only bring ruin and death.

Jack Hunter [05-29] The great fade out: Neocon influencers rage as they diminish: "Mark Levin leads a dwindling parade of once important voices now desperate to stop an Iran deal. MAGA world is increasingly tuning out." They may be receding, but like a flood they've left their filth everywhere, deep in every crevice of the national security hive mind. Cleaning them out is going to take much more diligence than scatterbrained posers like Trump and Vance can muster.

Steve M [05-30] The New Sanewashing: Assuming Trump Has Ideas, Not Just Resentments and Personality Defects. This cites three examples, all from the New York Times within the week:

I sympathize with reporters who habitually seek to find some "method in the madness," but even if some in Trump's orbit would like to dignify his outbursts with some kind of underlying concept, Trump himself shows little interest in rationalization. As M puts it: "Trump's only idea here is: 'You're criminals. We're not.'" As for the Wong articles, "Donald Trump, geostrategist? Nahhh." His notion of a new tri-polar world order may be more realistic than the Clinton-Obama-Biden "indispensable nation" hypothesis, but even so he's way behind the curve, where even the lesser BRICS nations are charting their own courses, and Europe is only humoring American vanities as long as the demands (like buying F-35s) aren't too onerous.

More from No More Mister Nice Blog:

  • [05-27] Democrats Need to Run on Their Policies' Coattails: Introduces Jess Piper, a Democratic Party activist who blogs as The View From Rural Missouri. (She doesn't say where, but in Applebaum and Joplin she gets there by driving south for four hours, so that puts her north of Kansas City, near the Iowa border. Joplin's 2.5-3 hours south of KC, and 3.5-4 hours east of Wichita. Piper is overly impressed with Anne Applebaum's Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, and for that matter with Heather Cox Richardson, who she reads "every morning," but unlike them shows little evidence of clamoring for foreign wars -- not least because she sees enough evidence of autocracy in Missouri to prioritize fighting it here.) Missouri is a former swing state that has turned into a Republican lock, but in recent years they've approved a number of referenda favoring issues like a $15 minimum wage and abortion rights -- issues that their elected Republicans then seek to nullify. The pitch: Democrats need to become recognized as champions and protectors of programs that are already popular. Which suggests they need to run on them, not just away from other Republican talking points.

  • [05-28] Elissa Slotkin Almost Gets It. I could nitpick my way through this, but let's just say that Democrats need to find a leader who can channel Bernie Sanders' critique, in all of its intensity and passion along with his own unassailable credibility and integrity, yet not panic the donor class into self-destruction and caricature. Slotkin has some of what's needed, but isn't there yet.

    By the way, Sanders blew his chance in 2020, by running to the left to stave off Warren instead of ingratiating himself with the party centrists. I don't particularly blame him for sticking with his instincts: Trump did the same thing, but he didn't offend the donor class the way Sanders did (he was, after all, one of them, whereas Sanders is not). But the real reason Sanders beat Warren was not because he was farther left but because he had much broader appeal. I blame the "smart money" people for not seeing that what they needed to win wasn't ideological purity but someone who could get votes by credibly painting Trump as crooked and monstrous. On the other hand, they should have known that Sanders was at most a mild reformist, and even his most strenuous efforts would be tamed by the lobbyists and bureaucrats in their pockets, protecting their business interests. One almost suspects that the reason Bloomberg et al. panicked so was because they realized that the left critique of their ridiculous wealth was too right to permit any scrutiny.

  • [05-29] That Origin Story for Trump's War on Higher Education Leaves Out a Few Facts: "Pro-Gaza campus protests are a pretext now. The war [he means Trump's war, or assault, on academia] would have happened anyway, because the right can't tolerate the existence of any institution it can't control."

  • [05-31] Do Trump's Poll Numbers Improve Every Time We Beat Him? Here he develops a couple ideas from a Ross Douthat column, on Trump's ability to survive his own self-made crises:

    I worry that many Americans are having a reptile-brain response to Trump's push-and-pull on tariffs. Obviously, MAGA Nation is happy no matter what he does:

    But I worry that there's a psych-experiment quality to this:

    1. Trump arouses anxiety with new tariffs. Markets tumble.
    2. Trump removes/suspends all or some of the tariffs he imposed. Markets rally.
    3. Even though we're no better off than we were before step 1, voters feel as if progress is being made. Trump's poll numbers go up.

    Trump's poll numbers aren't terrible anymore because he's constantly doing things, and constantly telling us he's doing things. Biden did things that would have paid off in the long run, but most voters didn't know what he'd done because he was a terrible public communicator, and because Democratic presidents generally assume the public will simply know what they've done.

    Trump's decent poll numbers suggest that roughly half the country just wanted a president who seemed forceful, no matter what he was doing -- and if they don't like the specifics, they believe there are still guardrails to save them.

  • [06-01] Trump Probably Doesn't Believe Biden Was Killed (but He Wants to Kill Biden's Presidency): Another example of how Trump doesn't just disregard truth but sees its violation as a stimulant, and how his fans find his lies all so very funny.

  • [06-02] Stephen Miller Was Already Trying to Memeify the Colorado Attack Just Hours After It Happened: Well, sure, I agree that "Israel's brutality in Gaza is no justification for this." I am, however, a bit confused by this group (Run for Their Lives) and the final line: "US supporters of the Israeli hostages say they're scared but have vowed to keep demonstrating." In Israel, hostage supporters demonstrate against the government, which clearly has no interest in freeing the hostages (and indeed, would rather they had been killed than captured). But in the US, who are they demonstrating for or against? The simpler, clearer message here is to call for a cease fire and an end to the genocide, which would almost certainly lead to the hostages' release, as that message could be supported by both friends and critics of Israel. But if, as suggested here, the group's demonstrations are strictly against Hamas, their purpose here is nothing more than to rally support for Israel's genocide: the hostages are pawns of Israel as much as of Hamas. The meme, by the way, is something about "suicidal migration" ("a powerful term," "a term we should use more"). It's stupid, but sometimes that's the best they can come up with.

  • [06-03] Democrats Aren't Doomed, Though They Should Be Less Doomed. This starts with Nate Cohn [06-03] Should Republicans Have Won in a Landslide?: "The question of whether Donald Trump cost conservatives a more decisive victory is a useful one to consider." This strikes me as fairly idle speculation, based on very little understanding of why Trump won and/or Harris lost. One thought that I do have is that while Trump may have had more negatives than many other Republicans, he alone was able to campaign on pure emotional energy (redemption, revenge, etc.). Any other Republican would have pulled the focus back toward policy, and Republican policies are notoriously unpopular -- which is a big part of why even Trump ducked Project 2025. And that's just the Republican side. Any chance that Democrats might run stronger candidates with better messaging? It's not like there's no room for improvement there.

Howard Dean [05-31] How Democrats can pull off a win under a GOP trifecta: Dismantle the "legal" drug cartel: Dean's leadership of the DNC produced major wins in 2006 and 2008, so Obama replaced him with a cronies who went on to squander Democratic majorities in Congress and in the States, leaving Obama as the only major Democrat to survive. I haven't noticed him name in ages, so I jumped on this. Not what I expected, but he has a good case against the rackets that manage pharmacy benefits. Just how Democrats can fight them without a power base isn't clear, but it should be a campaign issue.

Gregory P Magarian [05-31] Three ways the government can silence speech without banning it. "Among the present administration's chosen tools: making institutions stop or change their advocacy to get government benefits; inducing self-censorship through intimidation; and molding the government's own speech to promote official ideology."

Melvin Goodman [06-02]: Marco Rubio: The Secretary of Statelessness: One of the few hopes I have for Trump is the utter destruction and humiliation of Rubio, which seems to be well underway. He was the most unsavory of Trump's 2016 opponents, and by far the most ambitious of the 2024 cabinet picks, which is to say the one guy who still thinks he can outsmart and use Trump.

Tareq S Hajjaj [06-02] Aid massacre: Israeli forces kill 75 Palestinians at U.S.-run aid distribution center: "The Americans and Israelis set a huge trap for us to lure us here and kill us." Hajjaj had previous reports on the aid center from May 27 ("It looked like a large prison": Chaos ensures at U.S.-Israeli-backed aid distribution site in Gaza) and May 29 (Palestinians describe being treated like animals as chaos breaks out again at U.S.-run aid site in Gaza). Also:

Blaise Malley [06-03] "Shameful, vindictive erasure": Hegseth orders removal of Harvey Milk's name from Navy ship: "announcing the renaming during Pride Month was intentional." One thing about the Trump administration is that no chance to offend is too petty for them.

Cheyenne McNeill [06-03] "Disgusting abomination": Elon Musk attacks "big, beautiful" spending bill: Needless to add, while vomiting the usual clichés about "this massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill," he also took exception to the removal of several cuts that would have specifically benefitted his companies. For more on this, see:

Tweets:

  • Jeffrey St Clair [05-17]: I've read this headline story [from Haaretz: Prominent French rabbi receives death threats over criticism of Israeli policy in Gaza] three times and it's giving me a migraine . . . The Rabbi's getting death threats for opposing a policy of starving children to death. Who's the real anti-Semite? The Rabbi or the Zionists threatening her life?

  • Moira Donegan [05-18]: In what might be the logical endpoint of American Zionism, the Heritage Foundation has declared that pro-Palestinian activism is not just antisemitic, but is in fact a shadowy global conspiracy . . . led by Jews. [Link to NYT piece: The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement. Identified among the leaders of a global "Hamas Support Network" are "Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Sorow and Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois."]

  • Tony Karon [05-20] Imagine if Gary Lineker[*] had said this? Or any New York Times editor, or Democratic Party politician? Even Israel's Zionist parliamentary 'left' is making clear that Israel is not a "normal" state; it's a psychotic genocidal regime that must be stopped.

    In an interview with Israeli public radio yesterday, the leader of Israel's Democrats party, Yair Golan, said: "A sane country doesn't engage in fighting against civilians, doesn't kill babies as a hobby and doesn't set for itself the goals of expelling a population."

    [*] I had to look up Lineker, an English sports broadcaster (former soccer player) who has been blackballed by BBC for expressing "political views," although as far as I can tell not very radical ones.

  • Aaron Rupar [05-20] Tim Scott on crypto legislation: "This bill must go forward because it's good news for the American people, especially the ones living in poverty." [Rupar adds: "let them eat shitcoins"]

  • Mark Jacob [05-20]: Trump and RFK Jr. say today's kids are "the sickest generation in American history." Is that just a feeling? Here are some facts: About 46% of children born in the U.S. in 1800 did not live to see their 5th birthday. In 1900, the figure was 24%. Now it's under 1%. [Link to New York Times article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg/Dani Blum: Kennedy and Trump Paint Bleak Picture of Chronic Disease in U.S. Children: "A highly anticipated White House report blames a crisis of chronic illness on ultraprocessed foods, chemical exposures, lifestyle factors and excessive use of prescription drugs, including antidepressants."]

  • Alejandra Caraballo [05-22] This [the Republican budget bill] passed 215-214. We're going to lose our healthcare because 3 senior Dems have died this year. We lost Roe because Ginsburg didn't retire. We lost the election because Joe ran for reelection. Our country is being destroyed because geriatric Dems can't retire and let go of power. [What power? More like personal ego perks.]

  • James Surowiecki [05-26] [Linking to a Bernie Sanders ad and tweet, saying "75% of Democrats want the party to move in a more progressive, pro-working class direction. Is the Party leadership listening? Or will they continue with their ideology of maintaining the status quo?"]

    Joe Biden was the most pro-working-class president in 60 years, and working-class voters did not care.

    Nathan J Robinson replied: "one reason they didn't care is because half the time he could barely speak in complete sentences." Of course, the more obvious riposte was that the bar was pretty low, and Biden didn't deliver on most of the gestures he made, that he didn't make that many, and that few of them were bold enough to get attention. No doubt his inability to speak coherently about what he wanted was part of the problem. But also after a long career in the business-as-usual center of the Democratic Party, he didn't want much. But even if you buy Surowiecki's assertion, what about Harris? Biden may have been on the minds of those who hated him, but the name on the ballot was Harris, and how much working class support, or even rapport, did she offer? Clearly there was a block of voters who felt enough of a bond with Biden to vote for him over Trump, but didn't feel the same about Harris or Clinton, and they seem to have been the swing voters. It's unfair, and dumb, that Biden could win those voters when a pair of educated and wonky women with essentially the same platform could not, but the answer isn't to whine. It's to present a critique and a vision that voters (and not just donors) can get behind.

Current count: 169 links, 12807 words (15319 total)

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Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 15 days ago, on April 30.

I made a rather arbitrary decision after midnight Tuesday evening to post what I had at the moment. I'm pretty sure I have up to a dozen tabs still open, but I'm not expecting to have much free time Wednesday or Thursday, and didn't want to leave the thing hanging. If/when I do find time, I may add more here (if I think something fits), or save it for next time. One thing that kept me from closing was that I tried to answer a couple questions, and couldn't quite figure out the second (suppressed for now). Good chance I will focus on that next.

More 100 Days Pieces:

Norman Solomon: [04-30] The US left Vietnam 50 years ago today. The media hasn't learned its lesson: "The myth that news coverage turned Americans against the war persists. In fact, it was largely complicit in perpetuating the conflict." I'd go so far as to say that the value of a free press in a democracy is that it uncover the facts and framework so that we can properly evaluate and judge our politicians. American mass media has been pretty deficient on that score in general, but especially when it comes to matters of war. Solomon offers numerous examples of how easily the architects of the Vietnam War gamed the media. Sure, in the end, what we saw overwhelmed what we were told, to such an extent that many of us still distrust most public institutions: Trump's charges of "false news" work because that's been our experience forever.

American presidents have never come anywhere near offering an honest account of the Vietnam war. None could imagine engaging in the kind of candor that the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg bluntly provided when he said: "It wasn't that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side."

Two months after taking office in early 1977, President Jimmy Carter was dismissive when a reporter asked if he felt "any moral obligation to help rebuild" Vietnam. "Well, the destruction was mutual," he replied. "We went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don't feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability."

A dozen years later, Ronald Reagan told a gathering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington that the war had been a "noble cause" — "however imperfectly pursued, the cause of freedom."

While announcing formal diplomatic relations with Vietnam in July 1995, President Bill Clinton felt compelled to fabricate history. "Whatever we may think about the political decisions of the Vietnam era, the brave Americans who fought and died there had noble motives," he said. "They fought for the freedom and the independence of the Vietnamese people."

At the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington in May 2012, President Barack Obama spoke of "honoring our Vietnam veterans by never forgetting the lessons of that war" — which included "that when America sends our sons and daughters into harm's way, we will always give them a clear mission; we will always give them a sound strategy." But Obama was far along in replicating the tragic folly of the Vietnam war.

Yanis Varoufakis: [04-30] Trump and the Triumph of the Technolords: "Trump is a godsend for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and the other technofeudal lords. Any short-run loss from his tariff delusions is a small price to pay for an agenda that would deregulate their AI-driven services, bolster crypto, and exempting their cloud rents from taxation."

Ed Kilgore: [05-01] Marco Rubio Might Have His Jobs, But He's No Henry Kissinger: Huh?

Chas Danner: [05-03] Trump Loses Another Election Abroad: "Australia's Labor Party looked doomed a few months ago. Now, thanks in part to Trump, it's expanding its majority." The thing I don't quite understand is why the center-left parties in Australia and Canada were considered sure losers before Trump showed them that yes, indeed, things could get much worse. Sure, this fits in with the line that Harris lost as part of a global reaction against incumbents (that also wiped out the Tories in the UK).

  • Yanis Varoufakis: [05-06] Why the centre will not hold: Voters want the system upended: Starts with the Canada and Australia elections, although one could also look at the UK, and France, where the runoff system effectively keeps Le Pen out of power. For the moment, Trump is scary enough to drive voters to alternatives, but what more are the centrists offering other than not being Trump? Not solutions, scarcely even acknowledgment of concerns, but more of the "business as usual" that is generating such widely felt problems. And because they're not solving problems, or visibly attempting, and because they're reluctant even to assign blame and identify enemies (especially the ones they cultivate as donors), they lose all credibility -- even their dire warnings about boogeymen slip by the wayside, until someone like Trump gains power and reminds us how much worse it can get. One big point here is that the wins in Canada and Australia were achieved not at the expense of the far right, but by panicking the left into joining the center, even though the center has nothing positive to offer.

  • Wolfgang Munchau: [05-05] The death of the centre-right: It failed to address an alienated electorate: This is more of a Europe thing, as our two-party system only allows for left-right branding, even when both are for all intents and purposes centered -- meaning under the thumb of the same donor class and its dominant ideology -- leaving their branding options mostly negative: the Democrats are a mixed bag of liberal, left and center who can only find unity as anti-right; the Republicans are more homogeneous, but still are better defined as anti-left than as conservative, libertarian, authoritarian, or anything else. I would add that those stances are more emotional than logical or practical, which allows the center to cater to or humor them without sacrificing power or policy. (Although I'd also point out that the left has a coherent critique and program, and that the right doesn't, which gives the right an advantage for campaigning but makes governance a disaster.) Multiparty systems in Europe allow for more personal profiles: far-right and far-left vs. center-right and center-left are not just points on a political scale but, given the dominance of emotion over logic in voting, are becoming distinct personality types. In this scheme, as the system fails and panic increases, the far-factions increase at the expense of the center. But as this happens, and especially as the far-right become more ominous to those with centrist leanings, the center-right becomes the empty quadrant: they pale in emotional satisfaction to the far-right, they aren't needed to defend against the far-left, and they cannot be trusted by even the center-left to keep the far-right down (as the center-left has habitually done to the real left).

Alexander Nazaryan: [05-04] Who's to Blame for the Catastrophe of COVID School Closures? "A new book tries to make sense of a slow-motion (and preventable) mistake that affected millions of children." The book is An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, by David Zweig, who is interviewed here, and allowed to spout his opinions with no review. It isn't obvious to me that the closures were bad decisions, or that they had long term consequences, let alone catastrophic ones, but I also find it hard to credit strawman attacks on caricatures of a left that has never come close to exercising the sort of power they are blamed for. This ends with the interviewer asking "are you optimistic that officials will handle the next pandemic better when it comes to school closures?" To which Zweig answers: "I think a significant portion of the public just simply won't tolerate it the way they did last time." So next time will be worse, not just because we learned nothing but because the do-nothing agitators have only been further empowered.

Note that I'm not arguing that the closure policy was ideal or even right, and certainly not that we shouldn't review what happened and learn to do better. I'm not surprised that "remote learning" is less effective for many students, but surely it could be improved much over the current practice of just blasting students with data. Perhaps it requires more individual teacher attention, not less? Also, I admit that my views are rooted in my own ancient experience with a school system that taught me little and tortured me much. One thing I learned later is that at least some, perhaps many, students will learn on their own what they can't learn in school.[*] One thing I really hate is Zweig's attitude that every minute/day/month that a child is deprived of full bore, high-pressure education is a moment totally and irretrievably lost that will mar the person forever. I could point to the practice of tiger parenting here, but I see that more as an internalization of rat race capitalism, and its perverse reduction of human values.

[*] I am probably an outlier in terms of my ability to pick up expertise in purely academic subjects, which was possibly aided by my being freed from the school system at a tender age (15). But I've known others who loathed school and deliberately underachieved, but on their own went on to master not just the rote practice but the science and logic of the trades that interested and engaged them. I've learned as much from them as I've learned from anyone with a proper academic pedigree. Even so, I admit that there are things that I've been unable to learn on my own, where the discipline of coursework could have made the difference. In particular, I've long noted with regret my inability to advance in mathematics after my standard -- and frankly not very good[**] -- curriculum was broken. (I've compensated somewhat by reading books about mathematics, like Philip J Davis/Reuben Hersh: The Mathematical Experience and John Allen Paulos: Innumeracy, two general surveys I highly recommend, as well as more esoteric fare like Douglas R Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach, James Gleick: Chaos: Making a New Science, and Benoît Mandelbrot: The Fractal Geometry of Nature.

The exception (there always is one, isn't there?) was in 6th grade, when I had a very elderly -- and much despised by everyone else I knew -- math teacher who embraced the temporary vogue for New Math, and introduced me to sets and number theory -- concepts not only interesting in themselves but which provided nearly all of the math I eventually needed for a career in software engineering. It is worth quoting from the Wikipedia page here:

Parents and teachers who opposed the New Math in the U.S. complained that the new curriculum was too far outside of students' ordinary experience and was not worth taking time away from more traditional topics, such as arithmetic. The material also put new demands on teachers, many of whom were required to teach material they did not fully understand. Parents were concerned that they did not understand what their children were learning and could not help them with their studies.

But also note what they were opposed to (and eventually managed to shut down):

All of the New Math projects emphasized some form of discovery learning. Students worked in groups to invent theories about problems posed in the textbooks. Materials for teachers described the classroom as "noisy." Part of the job of the teacher was to move from table to table assessing the theory that each group of students had developed and "torpedo" wrong theories by providing counterexamples. For that style of teaching to be tolerable for students, they had to experience the teacher as a colleague rather than as an adversary or as someone concerned mainly with grading. New Math workshops for teachers, therefore, spent as much effort on the pedagogy as on the mathematics.

In other words, New Math might encourage students to learn on their own and to think for themselves. When I moved on to 7th grade, it was back to the rote learning of Old Math, where I learned little of note but the A grades were easy, and I lost interest -- especially after my 9th grade science teacher was so horrible I not only ditched that as a career inclination but never took another science course (and as such had diminished use for more math).

Kenneth Rogoff: [05-06] Trump's Misguided Plan to Weaken the Dollar: "The so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord, proposed by Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran, aims to reduce the United States' current-account deficit by weakening the dollar. But this plan is based on a deeply flawed understanding of the relationship between the dollar's global status and US deindustrialization." I've been asking this same question: if the goal is to square away America's current accounts deficit, wouldn't it be more straightforward to just weaken the dollar -- making US exports cheaper to others, which should result in us selling more, while making imports more expensive, some of which could easily be replaced with cheaper domestic supplies -- than to raise tariffs, which make trade less efficient while inviting retaliation? I've long assumed that the "strong dollar" was dictated by the political clout of finance, because the main effect of the trade deficits has been to feed money back into the finance system, making the bankers (if not necessarily other capitalists, like manufacturers) all the richer. Those in finance have little reason to reduce the trade deficit, because it's already working just fine for them. Rogoff offers a couple reasons why an attack on the dollar wouldn't help with the deficit, and concludes "the idea that tariffs can be a cure-all is dubious at best," but doesn't really answer my question. He is, by the way, a former chief economist from IMF, and co-wrote a famous book called This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, which I don't recall all that well reviewed. He has a new book more specifically on this subject: Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead.

  • Ezra Klein: [05-02] Trump vs. the Dollar: Interview with Kenneth Rogoff. An interview, which gets into more depth about "exorbitant privilege": where the idea came from (it was originally, as you might guess, a sneer, but has since been adopted as some kind of divine right), what benefits it bestows, and how insecure they may be. (What is lacking, I think, is details on exactly who benefits, and how much or little that may matter to the rest of us.) The bottom line is here:

    It has stabilized for the moment because Trump has retreated partly. But what I thought might have taken 10 or 15 years to happen took place within a week. And we're never going back.

    So our exorbitant privilege, our lower borrowings -- never going back to what it was. We may have lost a quarter percent, a half a percent, just permanently higher.

    We can have a recession to bring them down -- and we can get into that -- but I don't think that bell will ever get unrung.

    One especially interesting line is: "Americans know they've been good, but they don't know they've been lucky." That's pretty common among evidently successful people. Rogoff follows this observation with sports metaphors, so I'll drop in a couple more: "born on third base, but thinks he hit a triple." You might counter with Branch Rickey's "luck is the residue of design," but few other people ever cultivated luck as assiduously as Rickey. Donald Trump was born with so much luck he's spent a lifetime squandering it and still gets by on nothing but.

Adam Gurri: [05-07] Why We Need a Reconstruction of the Liberal Public Sphere: "How media systems work, how ours came to be, and where we go from here." Son of media guru Martin Gurri -- I have a copy of his 2018 book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, which seemed like it might offer some insight into the Trump-addled media circus, in spite of (or perhaps because) its author having wound up voting for Trump in 2024 (on extremely specious "free speech" grounds); I may have clicked here expecting Martin -- has "worked all over the adtech ecosystem," but also founded Liberal Currents ("an online magazine devoted to mere liberalism"). This is a long piece I've barely skimmed and can't especially recommend but the subject is important enough to bookmark it and return at some future point: Democrats desperately need to learn better ways of talking to and about other people, because recent approaches don't seem to be working at all. I don't know what the answer is, in part because it's hard to see how anything can effectively counter the forces that are fragmenting and denigrating consciousness with their relentless barrage of misinformation and misinterpretation. But I am pretty sure that nostalgia for "the Big Three" era isn't the answer, or even a part of it. That was, after all, the system that gave us the Red Scare, the Cold War, and especially Vietnam, and was still largely intact trumpeting Reagan's "morning in America," Bush's "new world order," and another Bush's "global war on terrorism."

  • Adam Gurri: [04-29] Unfit to Be the Ruler of a Free People: The Anti-American Presidency of Donald Trump: "The Trump administration is an affront to everything good that America has become and everything America has ever sought to be." This piece aligns the author with the liberal democrats who have always sought to see the sunny side of America idealism, and therefore regard Trump as an abomination, rather than as just an especially ripe and pungent instance of rot that's deeply embedded in American history. Choosing sides in this debate is a distracting parlor game, when it's much easier for both to agree that Trump and his legion are hideous and need to be stopped. Still, I will note that those who have tried to rescue patriotism and piety from the Republicans have had not only had very little success, they've become objects of ridicule for the very people they try to convert. (I was especially struck by how Trump made light of Obama's habitual "God bless America" speech ending, obviously a lie because they all agree he's a Muslim terrorist driven by his hatred and lust to destroy America. )

Gaby Dal Valle [05-07]: Grifters thrive under Trump's scam-friendly administration: "Gutted watchdog agencies and unprecedented 'influence peddling' means unrestrained fraud." This is the essential story of the Trump administration, the one you can be sure of adding new installments to each and every week. This is also Trump's main vulnerability, as his graft is only barely more popular among rank-and-file Republicans -- who are so easily motivated by the slightest stench of scandal on the Democratic side -- as with Democrats and independents.

Sarah Jones [05-07]: The Christians Who Believe Empathy Is a Sin: "When suffering is irrelevant, anything can be justified." I don't exactly understand why, other than because their politics depends on desensitizing to cruelty. Ends with: "The social contract is held together by empathy, which is why authoritarians fear and despise it so much. All they can offer is a net."

Orly Noy [05-07]: What a 'peace summit' reveals about the state of the Israeli left: "Well-meaning dialogue workshops, panels on distant political solutions, but no mention of genocide: these are privileged distractions we can no longer afford." I spent over a year, from Oct. 7, 2023 through Nov. 6, 2024, documenting and denouncing Israel's genocide -- a word that will suffice for what's happening, which admittedly is much more than that, but also no less -- but I've largely bypassed the subject since then. This does not represent a change in my views, or a lessening of concern, but simply a choice to focus my limited time and energy on matters that are less glaring and/or are open to possible solution. While I may have been overly optimistic that Harris, had she won and transitioned from campaign to governing (from sucking up to donors to actually having to grapple with real problems), would have compelled Israel to limit its goals, I was certainly correct that Trump would rubber-stamp whatever Israel's leadership wanted. Given that force is not a viable option -- no opposing force has the means, much less the desire, to go up against Israel (and the US) -- the Houthis and/or Hezbollah are at most minor irritants -- and that war wouldn't be a good idea anyway, and that US support can be counted on, the only way this ends is when Israel itself decides to stop it. Hence, our hopes are limited to efforts like this "peace summit," political efforts that gnaw away at blanket US/Europe support for Israel, and the resilience of the Palestinian people, who are paying the price for our confusion and indifference. As usual, if you want latest news, see this website, MondoWeiss, Middle East Eye, etc.

  • Basel Adra: [05-06] Palestinians awoke to bulldozers. Their village was destroyed by noon: Note that this was in the West Bank (not Gaza), the village Khilet al-Dabe.

  • Qassam Muaddi [05-09]: Exterminating Gaza was always Israel's plan, but now it's official.

  • Ofer Cassif: [05-09] Israel laid out its harrowing plan to take Palestinian territories in 2017. Now it is happening.

  • Faris Giacaman/Tareq S Hajjaj [05-06] Israel is creating a power vacuum in Gaza by backing armed looters -- and killing anyone who tries to stop them.

  • Mitchell Plitnick [05-02] Biden staffers admit what we all knew: White House lied about ceasefire efforts.

  • Dave Reed [05-10] Weekly Briefing: Israel plots ethnic cleansing under Trump's cover.

  • Thomas L Friedman [10-09] This Israeli Government Is Not Our Ally: No, he hasn't flipped. He still has "zero sympathy for Hamas" ("a sick organization"), and sure, it's taken him an awful long time to get to a point that should have been obvious even before the Oct. 7 uprising, but his extreme reluctance qualifies him as a bellwether. A tweet mentioning this piece starts, "when you've lost Thomas Friedman." If appeals for murdered children would have gotten to you, you'd already be clamoring for a cease fire, if not much more. Friedman only cares about something else: realpolitik. He recognizes that genocide is a bad look for Israel, and that it is bleeding support for the land and people he so cherishes, and under these circumstances, he sees that blanket US support only encourages politicos like Netanyahu to do worse things, to bleed more support.

    One way to look at this is: if you care for Palestinians, you've long recognized Israel as a force intent on your destruction, so your response is to two-fold: to elicit sympathy for your people, and to applaud their heroism and resilience in the face of occupation. You also have negligible political influence, especially where it matters most, in Israel and the US -- and especially to the extent that your aims can be viewed as a zero-sum game at Israel's expense. If your concerns are more general, if you oppose injustice and its enforcement in all forms, then you should be able to recognize Israel as a major offender, and seek remedies, starting with a ceasefire, that restore justice. You, too, have negligible political influence, at least in the US, as is evident by America's deep commitment to global power projection, and by America's generous support for regimes that have a history of abusing human rights. But at least your group is one that the real powers in pre-Trump America feel the need to pay lip service to. (Trump doesn't feel any such need, which makes him an object lesson on what happens when you don't at least pretend to have any scruples.)

    But there is a third group of people who have good reason to oppose Israel's genocide, and that's those who genuinely love their idealized notion of Israel, and wish nothing more nor less than to rescue their ideal from the racist/murderous reality that can no longer be ignored or excused. Their remedy of last resort is "tough love": Friedman's title cannot have been easy for someone who's spent 30+ years propagandizing Israel as America's greatest ally, but he at least recognizes the leverage point, and at long last sees no better option. This puts him midpoint on a scale that started with early "tough love" adopters like Peter Beinart and (somewhat later and more equivocally) Bernie Sanders, and will likely continue even beyond Friedman. When you still find Israel-lovers, work on them: ask how can they profess love of Israel and concern for the safety and well-being of Jews and still excuse what Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir have done? They have no answer, and need to see that. When they fall back on their hasbara, dispel it -- it's really quite easy, as at root its irreducible claim is that God's Chose People have a right to dominion over all others. (If you are one of them, you should recognize that the proposition is ridiculous. If you are not, you have no other recourse, as your side has been chosen for you.) And if they still refuse, they are lost -- as is any nation based on such obstinate self-regard. But we should be clear that anyone who still supports this Israeli government is no friend of the Israeli people and nation, or of Jews anywhere. It is they who are promoting anti-semitism.

  • Hanin Majadli: [04-09] This Intolerable Gap Between Jewish Memory and Palestinian Reality:

    I blame Israel's school system and the State of Israel for having introduced the Holocaust into my veins. . . . This intolerable gap between the memories of the Jewish people and the reality of the Palestinian people, between the insistent pledge of "Never Again" and what is happening now, in the present, is something that burns one's heart, something almost inconceivable. This is the gap between an Israeli society that opens its heart, at least ostensibly, to a painful historical memory while ignoring, sometimes brutally so, the pain that it itself is responsible for.

David Armstrong: [05-08] The Price of Remission: "When I was diagnosed with cancer, I set out to understand why a single pill of Revlimid cost the same as a new iPhone. I've covered high drug prices as a reporter for years. What I discovered shocked even me."

Jeffrey St Clair [05-09]: Roaming Charges: 100 Days of Turpitude: Starts with more on the new pope than I ever thought to ask. Although, for the record, see: Pope Leo XIV Calls for Peace in Gaza, End to Israeli Blockade on Aid. Of course, St Clair has much more than that.

Michael Tomasky [05-09]: You Won't Believe How Much Richer the Trumps Have Gotten This Year: Estimate is $3 billion in three months. A big chunk of that comes from crypto: whereas lesser crooks could be accused of "selling out," Trump gets to buy in, on terms that all but guarantee profits. And given his ability to direct public money to private ventures, his "investors" could be able to recoup plenty in his allotted four years. This flows into another [04-25] story specifically on crypto: "Trump Just Did the Most Corrupt Thing Any President Has Ever Done." That may seem like a big claim, but whoever's the runner up is nowhere close.

Nia Prater [05-09] A Few of the Many Lowlights of Jeanine Pirro, Trump's Newest U.S. Attorney. Trump nominated the Fox host after finding his original pick, Ed Martin, a counsel for January 6 rioters, "would be unable to survive Senate confirmation." It's hard to see how anyone who would object to Martin would be reconciled to Pirro (who "compared January 6 rioters to Revolutionary War soldiers").

Chas Danner [05-09] A Too-Deep Dive Into Trump's Doll Comments. For more on this:

Liza Featherstone [05-09] Kamala Harris 2028? Hard Pass. "Brat Summer is over and never coming back." She had a solid poll lead coming out of the convention. She had tons of money. Her opponent was a fraud and a nincompoop, and was promising to wreak mayhem on his supposed enemies. And to my mind, at least, she was likable as well as competent. (Maybe I was just a sucker for the cooking videos?) Sure, there were things about her campaign that bothered me, but the choice was so stark and her favor was so huge that I decided just to trust her. She had a theory about winning, and while I didn't particularly agree with it, it wasn't necessarily unworkable. So when she failed, it was just as easy to blame the voters as to blame her. (Pace Hillary Clinton, who did much more to deserve her loss.) But whatever the reason, she's just not substantial enough to keep running. (The only major party candidate to lose repeatedly was William Jennings Bryan, who you may or may not like but at least he stood for things. The only one to come back after a loss was Richard Nixon, and he was much worse than a serial loser. Third party candidates like Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, and Ralph Nader at least had stands, but anyone can be a "lesser evil," which was ultimately the bottom line for Harris, as for Biden.)

Steve M [05-10] The Rise of Fascism and the Tabloidization of Government: All of his posts are worth reading, but I want to quote from this one:

The dumbing down of America, on this and many other subjects, is a consequence of the politicized tabloidization of the news by Fox and other outlets. Let's look at what news ought to be and what it is now, thanks to Rupert Murdoch and other weaponizers of tabloidization.

We know what the news should ideally be: stories that tell us what we need to know about significant events in our communities and in the world at large. Tabloidization changes this formula: Instead of telling us what we need to know to understand our world, tabloid news tells us whatever makes our pulse race, and presents it all in the most emotion-inducing way possible. An editor of The Sun in Britain said that the paper should "shock and amaze on every page."

The evil genius of Murdochism is that it's politicized tabloidization. Fox doesn't present the news. It presents news (and pseudo-news) stories crafted as narratives of good and evil, with evil always represented either by liberals or by groups associated with liberals (people of color, sexual minorities, college professors, and so on). The top stories are whichever stories are most successful at getting viewers' blood to boil. . . .

Fox was intended to mislead ordinary Americans about what's really important, but it wasn't intended to mislead the people who run our government. Now, however, our government is run by people who also have Fox brain. They don't think they need to focus on issues Fox ignores, and they don't think they need to understand anything at a deeper level than what you get from Fox content.

Also see:

  • Steve M: [05-07] Punishment Is All They Want. Starts with a tweet from Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) saying: "The first person to be sent to Alcatraz should be Anthony Fauci." I don't believe that Democrats should attempt to match the glee with which Republicans wish to consign their enemies to unspeakable hells, but Democrats do need to get much stronger at assigning blame for what ails Americans, and promising to fix those problems, especially by removing those responsible from power. Once removed from power, there is something to be said for forgiveness and forgetting, because falling into the sadistic vengeance trap is not just bad for the victims, but for those in power as well.

Ammar Ali Jan [05-10]: India and Pakistan Are on the Brink of Catastrophe: "Many Hindu nationalists termed the recent Pahalgam terror attack 'our October 7' and now call for Pakistan to be 'reduced to rubble.' Even under a tenuous cease-fire, nationalist saber-rattling is colliding with the collapse of international law." This is always the risk when you install a government whose primary identity is hatred of others. Of course, there are differences, which should be sobering: Pakistan has 240 million people, whereas Gaza only had 2 million. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, where Hamas had little more than sticks and stones. On the other hand, Israel has shown what unopposed power can do, and few nations have followed their exploits more enthusiastically than India has.

Joan C Williams [05-10]: The Left Has to Speak to Average American Values -- or Perish: Interview with the author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (2019), has a new book out, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. Pull quote: "What working-class people know is that their parents' or grandparents' families looked quite different from theirs, and everything seemed to work then. Now nothing seems to work." I'm old enough to recognize what she's talking about from my own family and neighborhood, but I'm not feeling nostalgic about it; more like resentment, and relief that those times are behind us. I don't disagree that what we have now isn't working as well as it should be, but I prefer solutions based on what we've gained, not on what we've lost. Still, with the future unfathomable, people spend most of their time looking back, and that suggests some ways to talk about present wrongs. We do need help talking, because the standard Democratic Party spiel isn't cutting it. Speaking of which, which article led me to this:

  • Hillary Clinton [03-28] How Much Dumber Will This Get? Well, how much dumber are you going to make it? She starts: "It's not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it's the stupidity." Sounds like a distinction without much difference, but I'm always wary when someone like her calls others out for hypocrisy. We'll give her a pass on "stupidity," because she's much more useful as an example of how worthless, and sometimes dangerous, smarts alone can be. But Trump, sure, he's so stupid that even his denials ("stable genius," "person, woman, man, camera, TV") are ipso facto proof. His stupidity is so vast one really needs to be more specific. To wit, Hillary continues:

    We're all shocked -- shocked! -- that President Trump and his team don't actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What's much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That's dangerous. And it's just dumb.

    The rest of the op-ed is a long lecture excoriating Trump for sins against conventional (deep state? blob?) foreign policy -- "reckless with America's hard power," "shredding our soft power," "more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America's adversaries," "cozying up to dictators," "blowing up our alliances," "we also lose the qualities that have made America exceptional and indispensable" -- punctuated by bursts like "dumb" and "not smart." Even when she complains about "undermining the rule of law at home," "flagrant corruption," and "tanking our economy and blowing up our national debt," she's preoccupied with its foreign policy impact ("trashing our moral influence"). It has long occurred to me that her biggest mistake in 2016 was how much desire she had specifically for the role of Commander in Chief. Has any presidential candidate ever won, or even run, on a pro-war platform? Not even Trump has been that stupid.

    PS: My wife offered an answer to my rhetorical question: Kamala Harris. I get the point without quite sharing the feeling. Biden's wars, unlike Bush's, were things he stumbled into, out of bad luck, misplaced loyalties, and a deficit of understanding and will to do anything about them. Harris, following past vice-presidents, made no real effort to distinguish herself, and way too often parroted the deadly clichés of Washington defense-speak, which is pretty much what Clinton did, but with extra relish.

Dave DeCamp [05-12] US Replaces B-2 Bombers at Diego Garcia Base With B-52s: This caught my eye because my father helped build the first B-52s over 70 years ago, when I was a child. He continued to work on refitting and refurbishing the planes until he retired. As noted, the "main difference" between the bombers is that the B-2 has "stealth," but perhaps more important is that the B-52 can carry more bombs, and not the so-called "smart" ones: it is a tool for indiscriminate mass bombardment against an "enemy" that lacks modern anti-aircraft defense. "Between March 15 and May 6, the US launched over 1,000 strikes on Yemen."

Peter Linebaugh/Marcus Rediker [05-13]: A World Turned Upside Down: "Christopher Hill's history from below." Hill was one of the three great Marxist historians of British history, usually listed first ahead of Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, either alphabetically or by period. This reviews a new biography, Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian, by Michael Braddick. I've been reading a lot of Hobsbawm recently, because his period is closer to mine, but early on I was much more into Hill, perhaps because his period in British history directly flows into American history.

Scattered tweets:

  • James Surowiecki: [04-30] Starts by quoting Attorney General Pamela Bondi:

    Today is Fentanyl Awareness Day. In President Trump's first 100 days we've seized over 22 million fentanyl laced pills, saving over 119 Million lives.

    So each and every fentanyl-laced pill would, if normally distributed, have killed six different people? How does that even work? Even if each and every dose was potentially fatal, how does it move from a dead body to another living body? Wouldn't the second, third, and later generation doses weaken or decay or diffuse? And when you're killing so many people wouldn't there be some reaction that limits the spread? As Surowiecki notes, she's counting "one third of all Americans," even before revising her figures to "258 million lives. That's 75% of all Americans."

  • Sara B: [04-30] Happy 80th anniversary of Hitler killing himself in his bunker to all who celebrate, which, as I now understand, is not everybody.

  • Meidas Michele: [05-04] Just an image, which reads:

    Trump officially entered the psychotic emperor phase. He's not coming back. The Pope image was it. That was the line. He crossed it and kept walking. This isn't trolling anymore. This is clinical delusion. The tariffs on movies. Reopening Alcatraz. These aren't policies. This is a man deep in a psychotic loop thinking revenge is leadership and trolling is governance. Every time he does something more insane, MAGA cheers louder. And every cheer convinces him he's still the chosen one. So he takes it further. No one's driving the bus anymore. They're just throwing gasoline and screaming kumbaya and Hallelujah.

  • Rick [05-06]: Just an image, which reads:

    If we deported MAGA men age 17 to 50 & replaced them with immigrants the violent crime rate would drop 70-80%, Crimes against women & children would be almost zero.

    I'm not sure what data supports this hypothesis, but it's been widely reported that immigrants are much less prone to violent crime than natives, and the male age demographic certainly is, so if you could do this, you probably would see some movement in that direction. Of course, you can't do this, and whatever benefit you might see in crime reduction would be trivial compared to the disruption and backlash such a policy would produce, but the meme has a certain didactic value, as long as you understand that it's really just a joke.

  • Mariah [05-07]: Another image:

    Anyone else notice how all of a sudden no one's eating our cats and dogs anymore? No one's performing sex change operations in schools or aborting babies after birth anymore. The price of eggs doesn't matter and a recession isn't a bad thing, it's just a necessary growing pain.

  • Alan MacLeod [05-13]

    Real democracy is pleasing opinion columnists at a newspaper owned by the world's richest man. For more on how Bezos destroyed the Washington Post, read my report into the outlet.

    This was an article from 2021, so he likely has more he can add. What he does offer is a reference to a 2024 piece by Ishaan Tharoor on El Salvador: The inescapable appeal of the world's 'coolest dictator', Nayib Bukele.

    MacLeod started his thread with praise for Claudia Sheinbaum as the "world's most popular leader" (80% approval rating). Later down my feed, I find a faux link to another Washington Post op-ed, by León Krauze [05-09] Mexico's democracy is fast eroding under Scheinbaum's rule. Somehow these same hackneyed charges get paraded out any time any nation puts someone more/less left into power -- a template that goes back to attacks on Franklin Roosevelt -- yet right-wingers are never held to the same standard.

Obituaries:

  • Trip Gabriel: [04-30] David Horowitz, Leftist Turned Trump Defender, Is Dead at 86: I remember him as an editor at Ramparts and the author of one of the first books highly critical of historical American foreign policy, The Free World Colossus (1965), which I probably still have upstairs. After he flipped to the right, he published tons of books, but as far as I could tell never made a lick of sense -- typical titles include: Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (2004); The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party (2017); Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America (2017)); Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win (2020); and I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax is Killing America (2021). Also:

This is old, but I'm reading Carlos Lozada's The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, and the book is made up of previously published book reviews, so most of the chapers are readily available online. This one I especially recommend:

Carlos Lozada [2021-09-03] 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed. On the day, I was well aware of the history of American interventions in the Middle East, including Sharon's counter-intifada that was already underway in Israel and PNAC's plots to project US power throughout the region (their alignment with Israel's far right amplified by post-Cold War delusions of America as the world's sole "hyperpower"). So I saw the attacks as further proof of US mistakes, but also as an opportunity to change course and get right with the world, because doubling down -- as Bush and his loyal opposition did with scarcely a moment's reflection -- would only bring further pain and suffering, and ultimately ruin for all. (As, well, it did.) Mine was a very isolated position at the time, so I'm gratified to see a reviewer like Lozada come around to it eventually.

The books reviewed here are [* ones I've read, 7 of 21; order is from the article illustrations]:

  • [*] Steve Coll: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004)
  • [*] Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006)
  • Peter Bergen: The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden (2021): the latest of several books Bergen wrote on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, starting with Holy War, Inc. (2001)
  • Richard A Clarke: Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (2004)
  • Jim Dwyer/Kevin Flynn: 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (2005)
  • Garrett M Graff: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (2019)
  • Bob Woodward: Bush at War (2002)
  • [*] Jane Mayer: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (2008)
  • David Cole, ed: The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (2009)
  • The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program (2014)
  • Robert Draper: To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq (2020)
  • [*] Anthony Shadid: Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (2005)
  • [*] Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (2006)
  • [*] Dexter Filkins: The Forever War (2008)
  • Craig Whitlock: The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (2021)
  • The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (2007)
  • David Finkel: Thank You for Your Service (2013)
  • The Iraq Study Group Report (2006)
  • Spencer Ackerman: Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (2021)
  • [*] Karen Greenberg: Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy From the War on Terror to Donald Trump (2021)
  • The 9/11 Commission Report (2004)

I skipped all of the official reports and document collections, and I tended to focus more on early books (when I felt more need for research) than on later ones (which seemed unlikely to add much to what I already knew). The recent books by Ackerman and Draper look likely to be valuable. I'm curious about the Graff book to see how it dovetails with my memory. Of course, I've read more in this area. Omitting the large number of books on Israel, as well as most of the more generic books on US politics, Islam, and oil, here's a rough list (whittled down from here, sorted by year published):

  • Ahmed Rashid: Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2000): First book in English on the Taliban, predates 9/11 and the US invasion.
  • Tariq Ali: The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002): NLR Marxist, understood everything instantly.
  • Max Boot: The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002): Not on 9/11 or aftermath, but very influential for those who wanted to justify military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. For the rest of us, a comprehensive catalog of American military misadventurism (e.g., look up "butcher and bolt").
  • Dilip Hiro: Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm (2002)
  • Gilles Kepel: Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (2002): Published in France earlier, US edition includes a brief coda on 9/11. This is by far the best book on Jidadist thought all across the Muslim world, certainly to date, and probably still.
  • Lewis Lapham: Theater of War (2002, New Press)
  • Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002): One of the "clash of civilizations" hawks' favorite intellectuals.
  • William Rivers Pitt/Scott Ritter: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know (2002)
  • Shibley Telhami: The Stakes: America and the Middle East: The Consequences of Power and the Choice of Peace (2002)
  • Tariq Ali: Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq (2003)
  • Joan Didion: Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003)
  • Sheldon Rampton/John Stauber: Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (2003)
  • Jonathan Schell: The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (2003): More general book, but prophetic title.
  • James Carroll: Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War (2004): Also wrote an important historical book on the US military: House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (2006)
  • Seymour Hersh: Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004)
  • Gilles Kepel: The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (2004)
  • Mahmood Mamdani: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2004)
  • James Mann: Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2004)
  • Michael Scheuer [Anonymous]: Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (2004): CIA analyst.
  • Rory Stewart: The Places in Between (2004): Travel narrative across Afghanistan before US invasion.
  • Nicholas von Hoffman: Hoax: Why Americans Are Suckered by White House Lies (2004)
  • Andrew Bacevich: The New American Militarism: |How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005): The first of his many books on how Americans kicked "Vietnam syndrome" and learned to love war again.
  • Larry Beinhart: Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (2005): One of the best books ever on lying in American politics.
  • Aaron Glantz: How America Lost Iraq (2005)
  • Michael Klare: Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (2005)
  • George Packer: The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq (2005): Big Iraq war supporter changes his mind.
  • Scott Ritter: Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (2005)
  • Paul William Roberts: A War Against Truth: An Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq (2005)
  • Evan Wright: Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (2005): Embedded reporter on the road to Baghdad, basis for an HBO series.
  • Tariq Ali: Rough Music: Blair Bombs Baghdad London Terror (2006)
  • Ira Chernus: Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin (2006)
  • Noam Chomsky/Gilbert Achcar: Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy (2006)
  • Patrick Cockburn: The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (2006)
  • Michael R Gordon/General Bernard E Trainor: Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (2006): The embedded view from command headquarters.
  • Frank Rich: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina (2006)
  • Louise Richardson: What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (2006): Not just Jihadists.
  • Scott Ritter: Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change (2006)
  • Thomas E. Ricks: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006)
  • Nir Rosen: In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (2006): First report from an unimbedded reporter in Iraq.
  • Ali A Allawi: The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (2007)
  • Susan Faludi: The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (2007)
  • Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (2007): Massive reporting from all over. Previously wrote the definitive book on Lebanon, Pity the Nation (1990).
  • Dahr Jamail: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (2007)
  • Lewis Lapham: Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration (2007)
  • Trita Parsi: Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007): I've skipped over several other books on Iran, but this one has a lot of insight into how Israel uses Iran to manipulate the US (and why the US lets it).
  • William R Polk: Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq (2007)
  • Tariq Ali: The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008)
  • Chris Hedges/Laila Al-Arian: Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians (2008)
  • Eugene Jarecki: The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (2008)
  • Fred Kaplan: Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (2008)
  • Ahmed Rashid: Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (2008)
  • Juan Cole: Engaging the Muslim World (2009)
  • Gregory Feifer: The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (2009)
  • Karen Greenberg: The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days (2009)
  • Seth G Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (2009)
  • Jon Krakauer: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009)
  • Gretchen Peters: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (2009)
  • Thomas E Ricks: The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (2009)
  • Tariq Ali: The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad (2010)
  • Andrew Bacevich: Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (2010)
  • John W Dower: Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (2010): Historian of Japan, wrote two major books, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986), and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (2000).
  • Tom Engelhardt: The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (2010)
  • Chalmers Johnson: Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope (2010): Former CIA analyst, final volume in a brilliant series of books that started with Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000), one of the first books sensitive to the amount of self-harm America's empire cost. I've read them all, including The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004) and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2007).
  • Geoffrey Wawro: Quicksand: America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East (2010)
  • Nir Rosen: Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World (2011)
  • Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (2012)
  • Kurt Eichenwald: 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars (2012)
  • Michael Hastings: The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Story of America's War in Afghanistan (2012)
  • Rashid Khalidi: Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013): Palestinian historian, so most of his books focus there (I have read several), but US ability to interact with the Arab world is sharply limited to Israel's demands, so you can't really separate the two interests.
  • Jeremy Scahill: Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (2013)
  • James Risen: Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (2014)
  • Andrew Bacevich: America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (2016)
  • Rosa Brooks: How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon (2016)
  • John W Dower: The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II (2017)
  • Steve Coll: Directorate S: The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2018)
  • Tom Engelhardt: A Nation Unmade by War (2018)
  • Matt Farwell/Michael Ames: American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the US Tragedy in Afghanistan (2019)
  • Tariq Ali: The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold (2022)

This is, by the way, an incomplete list of books I've read by several authors: Gilbert Achcar, Tariq Ali, Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, Juan Cole, Steve Coll, Chris Hedges, Dilip Hiro, Chalmers Johnson, Fred Kaplan, Jon Krakauer, Robert D Kaplan, Rashid Khalidi, Lewis Lapham, Jane Mayer. The above list seems to tail off after 2012, which is roughly when the Obama surge in Afghanistan burned out. (The Michael Hastings book was pivotal, in that it was shortly followed by the sacking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the shelving of his counterinsurgency strategy, which had no support from troops who had little desire either to fight and even less to aid Afghans.) I wound up paying no attention to the handful of books on ISIS, or on the drone wars that were surging elsewhere. Besides, there was much more to read about elsewhere, especially in US politics.

At some point, I should revisit this list and try to draw up a shorter, more useful annotation. That obviously looks like a lot of work right now, but Lozada's piece is a good framework to start. I don't think his methodology of focusing on commission reports, document caches, and reporters with direct access to their sources (like Woodward) is better than my approach of mostly working through critics I'm familiar with and inclined to agree with (like Ali, Bacevich, Chomsky, Engelhardt, Hedges, Johnson, and Lapham), but if my preferred critics are right, the more conventional sources should ultimately fit into their understanding -- as they do.

By the way, a couple more personal 9/11 book remembrances:

  • Bruce Bernard/Terrence McNamee: Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope (1999): Big pictorial history with over 1000 images chronologically from 1900 into 1999. I spent much of the day of 9/11 thumbing through this book, which helped me keep the day's events in context.
  • Barbara Crossette: The Great Hill Stations of Asia (1998): A few days after 9/11, I went to the bookstore in search of historical background. I found nothing that seemed directly appropriate, but wound up buying this book on British imperialism in India, which reminded me of Jan Myrdal's brilliant Angkor, which showed how European imperialists mentally translated their disabilities into badges of superiority.
  • Robert D Kaplan: The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (2001): I also, in fairly short order, wound up reading most of Kaplan's travel/history books, including his most famous Balkan Ghosts (1993) and his valentine for the Afghan mujahideen, Soldiers of God (1990, reprinted 2001). His work helped me formulate a framework for understanding the region, although I tended to draw opposite conclusions from his, and I gave up on him as he became increasingly entangled in the US war machine.

Another old article link:

Alison L LaCroix: [2024-06-10] What the Founders Didn't Know -- But Their Children Did -- About the Constitution. This is a useful précis of her book, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, which covers legal arguments about federalism in the 1815-61 period. As noted, these debates have been resurfacing of late, especially around issues like abortion, gay marriage, and marijuana which states have often treated variously but which touch on constitutional rights that should be universally protected.

Current count: 74 links, 9592 words (11481 total)

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Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 13 days ago, on April 17.

Index to major articles:

I picked up this quote from a fundraising appeal from The Intercept, and it seemed like a good opening quote:

Elon Musk spent nearly $300 million to install Donald Trump in the White House and then gleefully tore through virtually every part of the federal government that does anything to help everyday people.

And now that Tesla's net income has fallen by 71 percent, he thinks he can just waltz right back to the private sector, no questions asked?

This brings to mind the phrase Fuck You Money. I mean, if anyone has it, if such a thing exists, that would have to be the richest man on earth. Elon Musk certainly acts like he thinks he has it. He thinks he answers to no one, and that everyone else must bow before him. And sure, he does get away with it much of the time, but that's mostly deference given by people who his accept his worldview and values. This is especially amusing where it comes to Trump.

Back in 2015, Trump was the guy who thought he had "fuck you money." He was by far the richest guy running for president, which allowed him to boast that he was the only truly free candidate, the only one who could do what he wanted simply because he thought it would be the right thing to do, while every other candidate was beholden to other richer guys, who ultimately pulled their strings. Of course, the big problem with that theory was that he had no clue as to what the right thing to do was, and anyone who put trust in him on that score was soon proven to be a fool. But it also turned out that Trump wasn't rich (let alone principled) enough to stand up to richer folk -- especially as he sees the presidency mostly as something to be monetized. (Perhaps at first it was more about stroking his ego, but even a world class narcissist can grow weary of that.) In the end, Trump not only doesn't have "fuck you money," he's just another toady.

On the other hand, Musk is just one person in a world of billions, most way beyond his reach or influence -- which doesn't mean he's beyond the reach or effect of all of them. By making himself so conspicuous, he's also made himself a symbol of much of what's wrong with the world today, and as such, he's made himself a target.

Bill Barclay: [03/04] China's Dangerous Inflection Point: "Is China's growth model exhausted?" I was trying to look up the author here, as some friends have arranged for him to come to Wichita and speak on Trump and the financial system. Aside from him being involved in DSA, and writing a lot for Dollars & Sense, I had no idea what he thought or why. I still can't tell you much. He starts by positing two views of China, then lays out a lot of facts without tipping his hand for any sort of predictions. The best I can say is that makes him less wrong than virtually every other American to venture an opinion on China in the last 20-30 years.

The simple explanation for why American economists and pundits are so often wrong about China is that they assume that everything depends on sustained growth, and the only way to achieve that is the way we did it, through free markets and individualist greed -- which, sure, lead to increasing inequality, ecological and social waste, and periodic financial crises. But after the depredations of the colonial period, and the chaos of Mao's false starts, China has actually proven that enlightened state direction of the economy can outperform the west, both in terms of absolute growth and in qualitative improvements to the lives of its people. Liberalizing markets has been part of their tool kit, and inequality has been a side-effect they have tolerated, perhaps even indulged, but not to the point of surrendering power and purpose (as has happened in the US, Europe, and especially Russia). What central direction can do is perhaps best illustrated in the rapid shift from massive development of coal to solar power -- a shift we understood the need for fifty years ago but have only made fitful headway on due to the corrupt influence of money on politics.

So when Barclay argues that China needs to shift to an increase in consumer goods spending in order to sustain growth rates, he's assuming that American-like consumer spending would not just be a good thing but the only possible good thing. Still, I have to wonder whether even sympathetic observers aren't blinded by their biases. I don't see much real reporting on China, and I'm not privy to any internal discussions on long-term strategy, but several things suggest to me that they're not just following the standard model of nation building (like, say, Japan did from the 1860s through the disaster of WWII) but have reframed it to different ends (as one might expect of communists, had the Russians not spoiled that thought -- perhaps the different residual legacies of Tsarism and Confucianism have something to do with this?).

While I've seen reports of increasing inequality and a frayed safety net, some things make me doubt that the rich have anything similar to the degree of power they hold in the US, Europe, Russia, and their poorer dependencies. While China has allowed entrepreneurs to develop where they could, the state has followed a plan focusing mostly on infrastructural development, systematically spreading from the vital cities to the countryside. Barclay singles out their focus on housing, but doesn't explain whether they've followed the American model (which is to grow through larger and more expensive houses) or by focusing on more efficient urban living. Housing is only a growth market as long as you can keep people moving to bigger and better houses. But just moving people from country to city is a one-time proposition, which seems to be what China's planners have done.

Similarly, China's shift from intensive coal development to solar shows not only a willingness to think of long-term efficiencies, but that they're willing to move away from sunk costs -- which in our vaunted democracy are attached to powerful political interests, making it impossible for us to do anything as simple as passing a carbon tax.

Another example of how China has been able to avoid getting trapped by crass economic interests is the pandemic response. Looking back, it was inevitable that the small business class in America would mount a huge backlash against the inconveniences of pandemic response, but China was willing to take the economic hit to impose a much more restrictive regime, thus saving millions of lives (all the while being chided by American economists for stunting growth, although in the end they fared better than most, even by such narrow measures).

PS: I looked up Barclay because some friends had invited him to come to Wichita and speak on "the international financial system, the dollar, trade, crises and Trump's (on again/off again) tariffs." He did, and gave a pretty general explanation that mostly aligned with things I already knew, with occasional political asides that I largely agreed with. In particular, his explanation of why some tariffs might work while Trump's will only cause chaos and turbulence was pretty much what I've been saying for months -- although lately, as I noted last time on Levitz, I'm coming around to the view that tariffs are bad political tools, especially given that it's often possible to come up with better ones. I considered asking a question on this and/or a couple other points, but as usual wound up tongue-tied and silent. China never came up.

Eli Clifton: [03-18] The Israeli-American Trump mega-donor behind speech crackdowns: "Miriam Adelson is more than a funder of the Maccabee Task Force, she's also its president." Given that Adelson is the biggest funder of both Trump and Netanyahu, it's getting hard to tell which is the dog and which is the tail. That one person could have so much malign influence over two "democracies" is one of the greatest absurdities of our times. By the way:

By the way, I wrote this entry after writing the closely related entry on the Lambert tweet below, but before I wrote the intro bit on Musk above -- much of which could apply just as well to Adelson, who like Musk is much richer than Trump, but who is less inclined to make herself into the story -- although as one of the top sponsors of both Trump and Netanyahu, she has as much as anyone to answer for.

Jeff Faux: [03-24] Time for a Progressive Rethink: "Anger at the Democratic Party's inept leadership and subservience to Big Money has been rising since the election. But the left also must examine our own role in enabling Trump." No doubt, but it's hard to read pieces like this without eyes glazing over, especially with lines like "Ultimately the 'identity vs. class' debates are sterile. Both are needed to create a political majority." I'd put more focus on:

  1. Setting out clear values that most Americans agree with, especially where Republicans are ineffective and/or unwilling to help.
  2. Acknowledging what works, and why it works, and keeping that as a baseline for changing what doesn't work, or doesn't work well enough.
  3. Identifying incremental policy changes that move us measurably in the right direction.
  4. Reassuring people that they have no reason to fear us overstepping the mark, and that all policies are open to be reevaluated if they don't seem to be working, or if they're producing other problems. We want tangible, practical results; not ideology.
  5. Making it clear who opposes popular reforms, and why, and acting strongly to counter their influence. In politics you need to be clear about who your enemies are, and why they are wrong.

These are very general statements, but it should be easy to see how they apply to any given policy area. Take health care, for instance. You can probably fill that form out yourself, in actual terms, without recourse to slogans like ACA or MFA.

Chris Bertram: [03-29] Trump's war on immigrants is the cancellation of free society.

Avi Shlaim: [04-04] Israel's road to genocide: This is a chapter from Shlaim's new book, Genocide in Gaza: Israel's Long War on Palestine. I should note that I was alerted to this by Adam Tooze: [04-13] Chartbook 375 Swords of Iron - Avi Shlaim & Jamie Stern-Weiner on Israel's war on Gaza, which reproduces the chapter but not the endnotes. If you have any doubts that this is genocide, and intended as such, you really owe it to yourself to read this piece. It is crystal clear on this very point, and anyone who continues to excuse or rationalize the Israeli government's behavior on this point should be ashamed.

Sarah Jones: [04-17] Pronatalism Isn't a Solution, It's a Problem: "We don't need more Elon Musk babies. We need reproductive justice."

Ana Marie Cox: [04-17] How the Radical Right Captured the Culture: "Blame Hollywood's 'unwokening' and the extraordinary rise of right-wing podcasters on slop: intellectually bereft, emotionally sterile content that's shaped by data and optimized for clicks." Long article with a lot of references I don't really get, so this is hard to recognize, or even to relate to much of what passes for culture these days.

  • Kathy Waldman: [04-26] Trump Is the Emperor of A.I. Slop: "It makes sense that a man who yearns for a reality untroubled by other humans would be drawn to an art that is untouched by anything human." I'm not really sure what's going on here, but a second article on right-wing "slop" surely deserves to be noted. I'm not sure that after Trump it will ever be possible for anyone to believe anything ever again. I'm pretty sure this is a trend that predates Trump. It certainly predates A.I., which, like capitalism, is more of an accelerant than something genuinely novel.

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-18] Roaming Charges: Trump's Penal Colony. Another weekly installment in Trump's catalog of horrors. I get the temptation not just to look away but to warily regard Trump's gross attacks on allegedly illegal people as some kind of trap, meant to provoke the sort of hysterical reaction he can easily dismiss -- after all, to his base, who but the wildly caricatured "radical left" could possibly defend the miscreants he is "saving America" from? And aren't there many more facets of his agenda, especially economic matters, that Democrats could oppose while expecting more popular support? But as St Clair makes clear, what's at stake here isn't immigration policy. It's whether the legal system can limit presidential power, and whether that power can run roughshod over the fundamental civil and political rights of any and all people in or subject to the USA. Unfortunately, Trump's criminal abuses of power are hard to explain to most people, partly because when focused on arbitrary individuals we fail to see how that may affect us, and partly because generalities, like the threat to democracy, tend to sail over our heads. (It's not like previously existing democracy really gave us much power to begin with.) We need to find effective ways of talking about Trump's fundamentally criminal-minded abuse of power. But we also need to find some alternatives beyond the widely discredited status quo ante.

Joshua Frank: [04-18] They're Coming for Us: Media Censorship in the Age of Palestinian Genocide. Starts with an example from the hard sell of the Iraq War, but as I recall there was considerable debate and debunking at the time, even if major outlets like the New York Times were totally in league with the Bush regime. A more telling example was the near total stifling of any response short of all-out war in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. (One example was how Susan Sontag was pilloried for so much as questioning Bush's labeling of the hijackers as "cowards.") While most people recognize today that the Iraq War, like the McCarthy witch hunts and the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans, was a mistake, the far more consequential decision to answer small-scale terrorism with global war is still rarely examined. Moreover, 9/11 has left the government with some legal tools that Trump is already abusing, as in the charge that anyone critical of Israel is criminally liable for aiding and abetting terrorists (Hamas, a group that has often proved more useful to Israel than to the Palestinians). But it's not just Trump, and not just the government: Israel has been using its influence to stifle free speech about a list of issues running from BDS to genocide in a quest for thought control that Trump is only too happy to jump onto.

Rob Urie: [04-18] Social Democracy isn't Going to Save the West. I figured from the title this would be mostly about Europe, but the examples mostly come from the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party, which is to say the one that pines for bipartisan unity with like-minded Republicans, while making sure that nothing gets passed that doesn't benefit corporate sponsors. The chart on the increasing erosion of Medicare to privatized "Advantage" plans is especially sobering.

Matt Sledge: [04-19] The Galaxy Brains of the Trump White House Want to Use Tariffs to Buy Bitcoin. The graft behind crypto is too obvious to even give a second thought to, so why do we keep getting deluged with articles like this, on proposals that people with any sense whatsoever should have nipped in the bud?

Antonio Hitchens: [04-21] How Trump Worship Took Hold in Washington: "The President is at the center of a brazenly transactional ecosystem that rewards flattery and locksktep loyalty."

Anna Phillips: [04-21] Why Texas is seeing eye-popping insurance hikes: "Worsening storms fueled by climate change, coupled with inflation, are driving some of the highest home insurance costs in the country." I pretty easy prediction at this point is that the home insurance industry is going to go broke, losing enormous numbers of customers who can no longer afford insurance, and ultimately failing even those who can. The only politically acceptable solution is for the government to shore up the industry with reinsurance, which given the industry's profit needs will be very expensive and wasteful. But the right-wingers will scream bloody murder over socialism, and governments will be hard pressed to come up with the funds.

Natalie Allison: [04-21] The story behind JD Vance's unexpected visit with Pope Francis: "Vance and Francis had publicly disagreed in recent months on immigration policies and other aspects of church teaching." Still no details here on how Vance managed to kill the pope and win the debate. Perhaps Rick Wilson's book [Everything Trump Touches Dies] has some clues? [PS: Next day tweet: Dalai Lama Quietly Cancels Scheduled Meeting With JD Vance"] I've paid very little attention to the Pope's death, but some of the first reactions focused on his concern for Palestinians and his opposition to war in general and genocide especially.

Ryan Cooper: [04-21] Pete Hegseth May Be Too Incompetent Even for Trump: "Turns out Fox News loudmouths are bad at running the military." I'd expect them to be bad at running anything. As for the military, there are reasons to hope that Hegseth's vanity and incompetence won't have a lot of effect: the organization is very big and complex, so his ability to deal with things on a detailed level is slim; it has its own ingrained way of doing things -- a distinctive culture and worldview -- that makes it very resistant to change; it engages very little with the public, in large part because it doesn't do anything actually useful; and its mission or purpose is largely exempt from the Trumpist ideological crusade, so his people don't see a need to deliberately break things. While all government bureaucracies develop internal mores and logic that offer some resilience against incompetent management and perhaps even misguided policy dictates, few are well fortified as the military against the direct attacks Trump and Musk have launched elsewhere. More on Hegseth and the military:

Will Stone: [04-21] With CDC injury prevention team gutted, 'we will not know what is killing us'. With a bit of effort I could probably find dozens of similar stories. The following are short links easily found near this piece:

Some other typical Trump mishaps briefly noted:

Greg Grandin: [04-22] The Long History of Lawlessness in US Policy Toward Latin America: "By shipping immigrants to Nayib Bukele's megaprison in El Salvador, Trump is using a far-right ally for his own ends." After a brief intro on the outsourcing of terror prisons -- not prisons for terrorists, but institutions to terrorize prisoners -- this moves on the history, noting that "in Latin America, the line between fighting and facilitating fascism has been fungible."

Dave DeCamp: [04-24] US Military Bombed Boats Off the Coast of Somalia Using New Trump Authorities: Evidently, Trump has extended warmaking authority to military commanders outside officially designated combat zones (Iraq and Syria), so AFRICOM commanders no longer have to seek permission to bomb "suspects."

Anatol Lieven: [04-24] Ukraine and Europe can't afford to refuse Trump's peace plan: "It's actually common sense, including putting Crimea on the table." In olden days, I would automatically link to anything by Lieven, but I haven't been following Ukraine lately -- although it's certainly my impression that neither the facts nor my views have changed in quite some time. The war is bad for all concerned, and needs to be ended as soon as possible. The solution not only needs to preclude future war, but to leave the US, Europe, Ukraine, and Russia on terms friendly enough that they can cooperate with each other in the future. That means that no side should walk away thinking it has won or lost much of anything. The obvious face-saving solution would be for a cease fire that recognizes the current lines of control. I guess we can call that the "Trump plan" if that helps, but that much as been obvious for a couple years now. Not in the immediate plan but very desirable would be a series of plebiscites that could legitimize the current lines and turn them into actual borders. My pet scheme is to do this twice: once in about six months, and again in about five years. These should take place in all contested parts of Ukraine. (Kherson, for instance, is divided, but mostly controlled by Ukraine. The current division could be preserved, or one side could choose to switch to the other. Russia could also request votes in other Ukraine territories, like Odesa.) The second round would allow for second thoughts, especially if the occupying power did a lousy job of rebuilding war-torn areas. One can argue over details, but my guess is that the votes would go as expected (which would be consistent with pre-2014 voting in Ukraine). Both Russia and Ukraine should welcome immigrants from areas where their people lost. No need to impose any non-discrimination regime on either side (other than to allow exit), as the Minsk accords tried to protect Russians in Ukraine (a sore-point in Ukraine, which largely scuttled the deal, leading to the 2022 war). Russia and Ukraine need to emerge from the deal with normalized civil relations. Ukraine can join the EU if they (and the EU) want. I don't care whether they join NATO or not, but NATO should become less adversarial toward Russia, perhaps through negotiating arms reduction and economic cooperation deals. (My general attitude is "Fuck NATO": it shouldn't exist, but since it does, and since Russia took the bait and sees it as a threat, and has in turn, especially in attacking Ukraine, contributed to the mutual suspicion, the whole thing should be wound down carefully.) Sooner or later, US sanctions should also be wound down, and the US should ultimately get out of the business of sanctioning other countries.

Trump, of course, promised to end the war "in a day," which was never likely, not because someone sensible couldn't pull it off in quick order (not a day, given the paperwork, but a few weeks would have been realistic), but because Trump's an ill-mannered, arrogant nincompoop who neither understands anything nor cares about doing the right thing.

  • Anatol Lieven: [03-07] Fareed Zakaria, stuck somewhere in 1950 or 1995, is wrong again: "Transatlantic elites let political bias and their sclerotic world view prevent them from seeing the Ukraine War for what it really is." Starts by noting that "certain Trump statements have been utterly wrong, unnecessary, and counter-productive" (e.g., "threats to take Greenland and aggressive mockery of Canada and Mexico," "constant threats of tariff increases"). Zakaria appears here as one of those pundits who have vowed to fight for Ukraine as doggedly against Trump as they have against Putin.

Ha-Joon Chang: [04-24] There Should Be No Return to Free Trade: A Jacobin interview with the Korean economist, who was one of the first to understand that so-called Free Trade was something much different from the win-win proposition it was presented as (e.g., see Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade the the Secret History of Capitalism, from 2007, among his other books).

Annie Zaleski: [04-24] David Thomas, Pere Ubu's defiantly original leader, dies at 71. One of my all-time favorite groups, starting from their first album, The Modern Dance (1978), which was some kind of personal ideal: a combination of concepts, aesthetics, and sounds perfectly in tune with my thinking and aspirations at the time. Also in obituaries this week:

Sarah Jones: [04-24] 'Education's Version of Predatory Lending': "Vouchers don't help students. Their real purpose is more sinister, says a former supporter." Interview with Josh Cowen, author of The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.

David Dayen: [04-24] The Permanent Tariff Damage: "Trump tries to walk back his tariffs after supply chain collapse and threats of empty store shelves. But reversing course entirely may not be possible."

  • David Dayen: [04-03] They're Not Tariffs, They're Sanctions: "Stop trying to place coherence on a policy that's really just a mob boss breaking legs and asking for protection money."

    The problem with this "logic" is that America is not indispensable and other countries have just as much ability to retaliate, forcing the whole world into recession and making it very clear who started it.

Christian Farias: [04-26] Judge Dugan's Arrest Has Nothing to Do With Public Safety: She was arrested for allegedly "obstructed the functions of ICE by concealing a person the agency wanted to arrest while that person, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was in Dugan's courtroom facing her in an unrelated matter." There is also an Updates file on this. Some more tidbits from the Trump Injustice Department:

Ross Barkan: [04-26] Trump's Most Unhinged Policy May Be Starving MAGA Arkansas of Disaster Relief: "Snuffing out FEMA is causing some collateral damage." Some jokes are funny in one context but not at all funny in another. Ronald Reagan's line about "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" was pretty funny when you didn't actually need the help, but it's actually a line that's been laughed at by no one ever in the wake of a natural disaster. Charity may help a bit, but it's mostly accompanied by opportunists and hustlers, and most of the money sticks to the fingers of whoever's handling it. And while the almighty market might eventually organize a somewhat optimal response, that's only in time frames where we all die. Disaster relief is one thing where we all automatically look to government for help. After a decade-plus as governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton knew that well enough that he made FEMA Director a Cabinet-level position. GW Bush then staffed it with shady cronies and their screw ups sunk his presidency even worse than Iraq. With its energy policies, Trump is guaranteeing that there will be ever more and worse natural disasters, and that a many Americans will blame him directly. Still, trashing FEMA shows a level of cluelessness that is mind-boggling. Remember how the winning campaign slogan of 2024 was "Trump will fix it!"? But since taking office, all he's done has been to break things further, perversely going out of the way to break the very organizations that had been set up to fix problems when they arise.

Matt Sledge: [04-26] Marco Rubio Silences Every Last Little Criticism of Israel at State Department: "he singled out a human rights office that he said had become a platform for 'left-wing activists' to pursue 'arms embargoes' on Israel: The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor."

AP: [04-27] White House journalists celebrate the First Amendment at the annual press dinner: I've always regarded this as a preposterously hideous event meant to glorify the absolutely lowest scum of the journalism profession: the people who do nothing with their lives other than wait hat-in-hand for the White House to spoon feed bits of self-important propaganda. The only saving grace was that sometimes stand-up comic might hit a funny bone, or some other nerve. But then the dinner would wind up with the sitting president trying his own hand at telling jokes on themselves. (The only line I remember was from GW Bush: "This is an impressive crowd: the have's and have-more's. Some people call you the elites. I call you my base.") As I recall, Trump broke tradition, and was a no-show. For some reason, the only president who had worked as a professional comic didn't have the confidence to risk appearing. Their initial idea this year was Amber Ruffin, but the timid Fourth Estate peremptorily cancelled her, yet still had the gall to pose their dinner as a celebration of free speech. And what better way to do this than by giving themselves awards for their courage? I wouldn't normally bother with this, but of all the stories they could have broke even from their rarefied perches, these are the ones they chose:

  1. Aldo Thompson of Axios won The Aldo Beckman Award for his coverage of the coverup of Biden's decline while in office.
  2. The Award for Excellence in Presidential Coverage Under Deadline Pressure (Print): Aamer Madhami and Zeke Miller of the AP, for reporting on the White House altering its transcript to erase Biden calling Trump supporters "garbage."
  3. The Award for Excellence in Presidential Coverage Under Deadline Pressure (Broadcast) Rachel Scott of ABC News, for her coverage of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
  4. The Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage by Visual Journalists: Doug Mills of the New York Times, for his photograph of Biden walking under a painting of Abraham Lincoln.
  5. The Katherine Graham Award for Courage and Accountability: Reuters, for its series on the production and smuggling of the deadly narcotic fentanyl.
  6. Collier Prize for State Government Accountability: AP for its series, "Prison to Plate: Profiting off America's Captive Workforce."
  7. Center for News Integrity Award: Anthony Zurcher of the BBC for his coverage of the fallout from Biden's handling of the Gaza War.

So, Gaza is bad, because it looks bad for Biden, but everything looks bad for Biden, and Trump was only newsworthy as a sympathetic victim. [PS: I looked at some of Zurcher's reporting, which was pretty anodyne. You get no sense of the pain and agony at the root of the story, because all anyone cares about is how it inconveniences the handful of political figures the reporter is assigned to cover.]

Nathan Taylor Pemberton: [04-28] Why the Right Fantasizes About Death and Destruction: "In Richard Seymour's Disaster Nationalism, he attempts to diagnose the apocalyptic nature of conservatism around the world." There is probably something here, although the tendency to psychologize issues is always suspicious. On the other hand, when he offers Israel as an example, it's easy enough to connect the dots (my emphasis added):

Israel's drift to the far right can be explained, he thinks, by its embrace of free-market neoliberal doctrine, which, beginning in the 1970s, effectively yanked off the restraints on Zionism's ethnonationalist urges. Hollowed-out unions, crippled welfare systems, and an ineffectual liberal opposition allowed a far-right ruling coalition to gain control of Israeli society without dissent. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) this, crises abound there. Israel is among the most unequal societies in the Western world. A sense of hyper-victimization is rampant in the populace. The country's "liberal" democracy is a contradictory sham, no more than a two-tiered apartheid system permitting only second-class citizenship to Arabs. Worst yet, Zionism's promise to deliver an ethnically pure "homeland" to Jews is a delusional lie, in part because Palestinians continue to persist in both their opposition and their sheer existence. As a result, endless war is the only political program on offer. (It's the only thing capable of delivering "moral regeneration," as Seymour puts it.) For flailing states like Israel, disaster nationalism is a way in which to "metabolise" the dysfunction. This is the dreamwork that keeps afloat the fantasy of ever-growing economies, of safer borders, of purer societies, and of returning to the way that things once supposedly were. What is less clear, after the deaths of over 50,000 Palestinians and the near-total destruction of Gaza, is whether any number can quench these urges once the dreamwork is fully set in motion.

The American right has been building and peddling its own version of this dreamwork from Reagan through Trump, although come to think of it, the disorienting fantasies go back to the ridiculous Birchers and Randians in the 1950s, which led to the Goldwater campaign in 1964. The popular breakthroughs came with Nixon, who claimed support from a "silent majority," and Reagan, who promised deliverance from the unsettling troubles of the 1960s and 1970s. His "it's morning in America" offered us a tranquilizer to mask the pain he administered, as many Americans turned to comforting fantasies. Even when it wore off, Americans were left dazed and confused -- a condition only made worse when Democrats like Clinton and Obama tried to sell their own branded versions of American fantasyland rather than expose what the right was actually doing.

I never for a moment bought into Reagan's spiel: my stock line at the time was "the only boom industry in America is fraud." If you missed the moment, the book I recommend is Will Bunch: Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, mostly because he sees right through Reagan and cuts him no slack -- unlike the more "nuanced" but still useful books by Rick Perlstein and Gary Wills (both did better with Nixon, especially the latter's Nixon Agonistes, as he was a much more complex, arguably even tragic but in no sense sympathetic, figure). I had so little respect for Reagan that I long resisted the idea that his election delineated an era in American history: even though my days as a starry-eyed American idealist ended quite definitively in the late 1960s, I couldn't fully accept that America was capable of making such a bad turn. I only let go of that naivete when I realized the extent to which Clinton and Obama saw themselves as perfecting an idealized Reaganite dream. Only just today, about 50 pages into Carlos Lozada's The Washington Book, did it occur to me that Obama's presidency was mostly an attempt to write a happy ending to the Reagan Revolution and rescue the American Dream. He, of course, failed, as the American people had watched the same movie but chose instead the Trump ending, where the bad guys triumph and burn the whole set down.

This might be a good point to mention:

  • Steve M: [04-29] Even When Republicans Were Voting for Mainstream Candidates, Trumpism Is What They Wanted: Skip the piece that sets this up, where "Jonathan Chait tries to imagine a normal Trump presidency," and go straight to the meat of the argument:

    In the pre-Trump years, even when Republican voters settled on Mitt Romney and John McCain as party standard-bearers, they craved more, perking up in 2008 only when the charismatic demagogue Sarah Palin joined the ticket and embracing would-be authoritarians Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in 2012 before Mitt Romney's money sank their campaigns. Trump is the kind of president they've always wanted, the fantasy avenger from the QAnon posts so many of them binge-consumed during the height of the COVID pandemic.

  • Steve M: [04-28] We Have to Save Ourselves From Trump, Because Ambitious Careerists Won't: "That's why the second-term Trump resistance came from the bottom up. The rest of us have less to lose." He's contrasting us to the media and political hacks (including businesses, nonprofit orgs, and law firms) who Trump is so focused on intimidating. But much of the "bottom up" resistance has everything to lose, with few if any options to just play along (like most of the careerists can, and many are doing).

  • Steve M: [04-27] You Know What Else People Discuss Around Their Kitchen Tables? Life-Threatening Illnesses. Of the "specific issues" mentioned below, the one with the most anti-Trump polling is "Reducing federal funding for medical research," with 21% support, 77% opposed.

    Trump's numbers are especially bad on specific issues . . . If establishment Democrats are worried about attacking Trump in his areas of strength, maybe they should stop worrying -- he no longer seems to have areas of strength. But if they want to be cautious, you'd imagine that they'd want to go for the areas where he's weakest. But that doesn't seem to be the case. The most timid Democrats are locked into a rigid formula. Talk about nothing, except the economy and Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security. Never veer from this path.

    My explanation for this is that all politicians have three jobs: talk to donors to raise money, which mostly involves promising to make them more money, and that they have to do almost continuously; talk to voters, but that only really matters in the run up to an election, and by then it's usually easier to slam their opponents than to promise anything substantial; and, once elected, address and solve real problems, but that's hard (especially after your commitments to donors and voters, and with every special interest represented by hordes of lobbyists) and failure is easy to explain and who really notices anyway? Republicans have it a bit simpler, because their donors and base want different things and the latter rarely realizes when they're in conflict. As for fixing things, no one expects much from Republicans other than lower taxes (and other favors to the rich).

    The economy is a safe topic for Democrats, because they can legitimately promise to make the rich richer, which is what donors want to hear. Medicare/medicaid is also safe, because it doesn't bother donors, and helps save capitalism from its more inhumane effects, thus forestalling the spectre of revolution. (Republicans disagree here, because they have so little respect for little folk they don't see any risk to their dominion.) Democrats also find it safe to talk in generalities -- like norms, due process, autocracy vs. democracy -- which, again, donors accept, while most people have trouble translating such abstractions to their everyday lives. That seems to be the point, as anything more explicit runs the risk of upsetting some donor or lobbyist.

    For Democrats, this fear of saying anything unsafe is drummed in from the start. It comes from the donors, and from the party consultants (who are basically conduits to donors), and it is reinforced by the media, ever vigilant for a gaffe or any form of hypocrisy, not least because they know the Republican attack machine is always ready to pounce. The most obvious example of donor bias right now concerns Israel. Well over half of Democratic voters are appalled by the genocide in Gaza and want to see the US pressing hard for a ceasefire [see: 7 in 10 Democrats Say US Should Restrict Aid to Israel], but fewer than 1-in-10 elected Democrats are willing to say so in public. One problem here is that playing it safe rarely helps Democrats, because Republicans are just as happy exploiting it as proof of corruption and hypocrisy. Democrats have no answer for that. On the other hand, Trump seems to be immune to such charges, because everyone acknowledges that he lies all the time, and lots of people see his corruption as cunning (or at least don't see that it hurts them).

    So, sure, Democrats need to learn to talk better to ordinary folk about everyday issues. It might help to spend less time courting donors and more time speaking (and listening) to the public. They need to get their emotional signals straight, which can include outrage when the occasion calls for it (which with Trump is pretty damn often). They've got a lot of work to do. We need at least to see them trying. As long as they are, we need to cut them some slack. Politics isn't easy. Otherwise, politicians could do it, and clearly they can't.

  • Steve M: [04-26] The GOP is a Niche Party. So much for the 18-29 Republican wave.

  • Steve M: [04-24] Trump's Approval Seemed to Have a High Floor, but Not Anymore. Interesting thing in the chart here is how support for Trump on inflation has fallen almost exactly in line with support for his tariffs. The argument that tariffs would cause higher prices seems to have stuck. (On the one hand, it's obvious; on the other, why did anyone think Trump would do anything to fight inflation other than start a recession?)

Branko Marcetic: [04-28] How Joe Biden Gave Us a Second Trump Term: A Current Affairs interview with just about the only writer who bothered in 2020 to publish a book on the Democratic Party presidential nominee, Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. More recently, Marcetic has written a two-part assessment of Biden's term [01-17]: At Home, Joe Biden Squandered Countless Opportunities, and On Foreign Policy, Biden Leaves a Global Trail of Destruction. I don't really feel like rehashing all this now, but it's here for future reference.

Herb Scribner/Praveena Somasundaram: [04-29] Trump administration fires Holocaust Museum board members picked by Biden: "The White House said it will replace former board members, including former second gentleman Doug Emhoff, 'with steadfast supporters of the State of Israel'." All part of their redefinition of "genocide" according not to what is done but to who does it, so they can convert the horror most people feel when faced with genocide to antisemitism that might convince diaspora Jews to move to their supposedly safe haven in Israel. Not that they had much to worry about with Biden appointees, but Trump likes this idea so much he wants to hog all the credit for promoting it. Recall that the US Holocaust Museum was created by Jimmy Carter as a sop to get Israel to sign the peace deal with Egypt. Of course, Americans were horrified by the Nazi Judeocide, but it also had the convenience of swearing eternal memory there while deliberately overlooking holocausts much closer to home.

Zack Beauchamp: [04-29] How Trump lost Canada: "Trump's '51st state' talk brought Canada's Liberals back from the dead -- and undermined a key American alliance."

Nick Turse: [04-30] The First Forever War: "The Vietnam War Is Still Killing People, 50 Years Later."

Scattered tweets:

  • Matt Huber [04-28]: responding to a Cory Booker tweet: "We must stand up and speak out, not because something is left or right, but if it is right or wrong."

    I really do blame Obama for convincing a generation of Democrats that you can will your way into power via platitudes.

  • Sam Hasselby [04-29]: responding to quotes from Mike Huckabee: "I believe Israel is a chosen place, for a chosen people, for a chosen purpose." "There is no explanation for the USA other than there was a God who intervened on behalf of the colonists." "Our alliance is so strong because it is not political, it is spiritual."

    There is vastly more anti-semitism in American evangelicalism than there is in the Ivy League, including Mike Muckabee the US Ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is a real end-timer millenarian. He expects Jesus Christ to return in the Second Coming, in which all Jewish and Muslim . . . [his ellipses]

  • Caitlin Johnstone [04-28]:

    The word "antisemite" has become so meaningless that now whenever someone uses it you have to ask them "What kind? The Hitler-was-right kind or the stop-bombing-hospitals kind?"

  • Drop Site News [04-28]: Headline: "REPORT: Biden Official Admit They Never Pressured Israel for Ceasefire, as Israeli Leaders Boast of Playing Washington": Long multi-part tweet, and credible as far as it goes, but where's the actual report? I'm seeing lots of interesting stuff on their website, including The Ongoing Gaza Genocide and the State of "Ceasefire" Negotiations, and Netanyahu Promises the "Final Stage" of Gaza Genocide Will Lead to Implementation of "Trump's Plan", but nothing that matches this story. What I am seeing are multiple tweets attacking AOC, arguing that her "lying about Joe Biden working for a ceasefire will haunt her for the rest of her career."

One more tweet: [04-21] This started as a bullet item above, but turned into its own section:

Daniel Lambert: [Image from National Review reads: "Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap projected an antisemitic message onstage at Coachella this weekend. It read: 'Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. It is being enabled by the U.S. government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes. F*** Israel, Free Palestine.'" The two statements are unequivocally true, way beyond any conceivable doubt. The conclusion doesn't necessarily follow: it's not one that I personally endorse -- but it is not uncommon or unnatural that when two countries commit and rationalize genocide, that other people would denounce the aggressors -- most want them to be stopped, and many want to see them punished, both for their own crimes and as a warning to others -- and would find themselves in sympathy with the victims.

But the only conclusions that actually matter are the ones backed with power. Even prominent politicians who clearly oppose genocide have little if any effect as long as Netanyahu's administration has enjoyed blank check support from Biden and Trump, and both political establishments are isolated from public disapproval. The idea of treating any criticism of Israel as antisemitism is a cynical smoke screen to deny, and increasingly to banish, dissent from current political policy. If anything is antisemtic, it is the attempt to link all Jews everywhere to the genocidal policies of Netanyahu and his allies in Israel. While most people can see through this ploy, the net effect is surely to promote more antisemitism -- which for Zionists is actually a feature, as they depend on antisemitism to drive Jews from the diaspora to Israel. (Which fits in nicely with the desire of traditional antisemites on Europe and America.) The thing to understand here is that the people who are trying to define criticism of Israel (and American policy supporting Israel) are not just acting in bad faith, but are promoting widespread, indiscriminate anti-Jewish blowback.

As such, they are acting against the best interests of most Jews worldwide, and against however may Jews who disagree with Netanyahu and his mob within Israel. If your prime interest is solidarity with Palestinians, you're unlikely to care about this antisemitism line -- either you recognize it as rubbish, or perhaps you take the bait and start making your own generalizations about Jewish support for Israel. But if you actually care about Israel, even if you're very reluctant to acknowledge its long troubled history, you need to recognize that this ploy it first and foremost a scheme to keep you in line and under control. Netanyahu has build his whole career on making and keeping enemies. He knows how to use their hate for his own purposes. What he can't handle is his (well, Israel's) friends turning on him, because when they do, he's finished, and so is his genocidal war. This antisemitism ploy is a thin reed to hang his political future on, not least because it's patently ridiculous, but as long as Trump is cashing Adelson's checks, the fix seems to be in -- giving them the illusion of winning even while public opinion is heading steadily the other direction.

By the way, consider this piece:

  • Isaac Chotiner: [04-22] The Biden Official Who Doesn't Oppose Trump's Student Deportations: "Why the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt blames universities for 'opening the door' to the Trump Administration's professed campaign to tackle antisemitism." Lipstadt is a good example of someone who has built her career on exaggerating the importance and prevalence of antisemitism in America, which makes her the perfect sucker for this line of attack. By the way, Nathan J Robinson tweeted about this article:

    Many liberals would happily get on board with huge parts of the authoritarian agenda if it was presented a little less crassly. That's why I think Trump is ultimately foolish and will fail. He doesn't understand that many liberal elites could very easily be allies of fascism.

    Harvard for instance didn't really want to fight Trump and would have struck a deal with him if he'd been just a little more delicate. These people are naturally capitulators to authoritarianism, not enemies of it. Trump is so stupid that he forces them to be his adversaries.

    Perhaps that is because Trump isn't self-conscious enough to see fascism as an ideological agenda. For him, it's just a bundle of his personality's irritable mental gestures. He doesn't care whether anyone else agrees with him, as long as they let him have his way. Of course, over time he is increasingly surrounded by followers who do believe in fascism-for-fascism's sake (Miller and Bannon from his first term, practically everyone this time).

PS: Kneecap published a statement, so let's file it here:

Since our statements at Coachella -- exposing the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people -- we have faced a coordinated smear campaign.

For over a year, we have used our shows to call out the British and Irish governments' complicity in war crimes.

The recent attacks against us, largely emanating from the US, are based on deliberate distortions and falsehoods. We are taking action against several of these malicious efforts.

Let us be absolutely clear.

The reason Kneecap is being targeted is simple -- we are telling the truth, and our audience is growing.

Those attacking us want to silence criticism of a mass slaughter. They weaponize false accusations of antisemitism to distract, confuse, and provide cover for genocide.

We do not give a f*ck what religion anyone practices. We know there are massive numbers of Jewish people outraged by this genocide just as we are. What we care about is that governments of the countries we perform in are enabling some of the most horrific crimes of our lifetimes -- and we will not stay silent.

No media spin will change this.

Our only concern is the Palestinian people -- the 20,000 murdered children and counting.

The young people at our gigs see through the lies.

They stand on the side of humanity and justice.

And that gives us great hope.

I'll note that while much of what they've said is indeed "absolutely clear," two lines are open to wide interpretation: "Fuck Israel" and "Free Palestine." I personally wouldn't read anything more than the minimum into such phrases. "Fuck Israel" goes beyond opposing genocide to expressing contempt for the rationalizations Israel's supporters offer for their racism and genocide. "Free Palestine" expresses the hope that Palestinians can live in peace and freedom in the lands they call home. I see no reason they can't enjoy that freedom in lands also inhabited by Israelis, but that seems to be up to the Israelis, whose desires to kill and expel Palestinians are no longer latent within Zionist ideology, but have been shamelessly exposed over the last 18 months. That anyone could interpret such coarse slogans as meaning that Palestinians seek to do unto all Israelis what some Israelis are currently doing pretty indiscriminately to all Palestinians in Gaza and many in the other Occupied Territories just shows how hegemonic Israel's paranoid propaganda has become.

The one quibble I have with Kneecap's statement is that I wouldn't stop at "20,000 murdered children" as I am every bit as offended by the countless murdered adults -- even the so-called "militants" (which Israel seems to blanket define as any male 15-60, a typically gross generalization; not would I exempt actual militants -- while I have no more sympathy for them than I have for Israel's, or anyone's, soldiers, I have no doubt but that they were driven to fight by Israeli injustice, and that nearly all of them would put down their arms if given the chance to live in a free and just society). In any case, the solution is never to kill your way to "victory." It is to establish a fair and equitable system of justice, while letting past fears and hates subside into history.

When I opened this file, I left myself an extra day to add a few new pieces. In particular, I was thinking that as Trump's regime passes its 100-day mark, we'd be deluged with summaries, and that would be a good way to close. Trump himself celebrated the milestone with a rally -- see Trump rallies supporters in Michigan to mark 100 days in office -- where he bragged: "We've just gotten started. You haven't seen anything yet."

By the way, the "100 days" benchmark was largely invented in response to the first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt's first term, in 1933. For a good history, see Jonathan Alter: The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope. (There is a new piece by Alter below.) Roosevelt had won a landslide election in November, which also produced large Democratic majorities in Congress (also, many of the Republicans who survived, especially in the Senate, were on the progressive side of the GOP), but couldn't take office until March. During that period, Herbert Hoover not only remained as president, he doubled down on doing nothing to stop the depression. Roosevelt was Hoover's polar opposite: a politician with a strong belief that government could and should act dramatically to help people and improve the economy, but with few fixed ideas about what to do, a willingness to try things, and to make changes according to whatever worked best. The most immediate problem there was the banking system, which was nearing total collapse. His handling of the banking crisis was probably the single most brilliant exercise of presidential power ever. He did three things: he declared a "bank holiday," briefly closing the banks to halt the panic that was causing banks to fail due to runs on savings; he went on the radio, and patiently and expertly explained to people how banking works, and why they need to show some patience, so he could reopen the banks without triggering a panic; and he passed a major bill regulating the banking system (known as Carter-Glass, the law that Bill Clinton repealed, leading to the collapse of the financial system in 2008), which included Federal Deposit Insurance (a rare case where the very existence of insurance prevents it from ever having to pay out). That was just one of 15 bills, many major, that Roosevelt signed in his 100 days. He went on to do much more during his long presidency (including Social Security, and leading the fight in WWII), but those 100 days were especially remarkable: unprecedented, and a yardstick that no later president has some close to matching.

Trump, in contrast, has passed no significant legislation, nor has he made any remotely successful efforts to mold public opinion. What he has done has been to use (and abuse) his executive powers to an extraordinary, unprecedented degree, further exposing the long-time shift of power from Congress to the Executive Branch, and the inability of Congress and/or the Courts to function as any sort of limit on presidential power (largely due to Trump's absolute domination of the Republican Party, which enjoys narrow majorities in Congress and an effectively packed Court system).

Not a lot of really good summaries to date, but here are a few more pieces:

  • Aliya Uleuova/Will Craft/Andrew Witherspoon: [04-30] Trump 100 days: tariffs, egg prices, Ice arrests and approval ratings -- in charts.

  • Sasha Abramsky: [04-29] The First 100 Days of Self-Dealing Trump's Thugocracy.

  • Jonathan Alter: [04-29] Trump's First 100 Days: Roosevelt in Reverse: "FDR calmed and unified the country: Trump has terrified and further divided us."

  • Amnesty International: [04-30] President Trump's First 100 Days: Attacks on Human Rights, Cruelty and Chaos.

  • Jamelle Bouie: [04-30] The New Deal Is a Stinging Rebuke of Trump and Trumpism: The FDR standard, again, which should be measured by quality as well as quantity. Trump, with his 100 executive orders on day one, clearly has the quantity, but many of those are tied up in the courts, and most are subject to repeal as cavalierly as they were instituted. As for quality, one way to measure it this early in the game might be to compare polling, which is starkly down for Trump so far. We don't have comparable figures for Roosevelt, but it's a fairly safe guess that he was more popular after 100 days than when he started. Four years later he was reelected in the largest electoral landslide to that point. Also by Bouie:

    • Jamelle Bouie: [04-26] Trump Doesn't Want to Govern: "He wants to rule."

    • Jamelle Bouie: [04-23] One Way to Keep Trump's Authoritarian Fantasy From Becoming Our Reality: "Trump wants you to think resistance is futile. It is not." Also (omitting a parenthetical I don't think helps):

      Cooperation with a leader of this ilk is little more than appeasement. It is little more than a license for him to go faster and push further -- to sprint toward the consolidated authoritarian government of Trump's dreams. . . .

      The individuals and institutions inclined to work with Trump thought they would stabilize the political situation. Instead, the main effect of going along to get along was to do the opposite: to give the White House the space it needed to pursue its maximalist aims. . . .

      Trump wants us to be demoralized. He wants his despotic plans to be a fait accompli. They will be if no one stands in the way. But every time we -- and especially those with power and authority -- make ourselves into obstacles, we also make it a little less likely that the administration's authoritarian fantasy becomes our reality.

      I'll add that just as Trump's been using his first 100 days to see what he can get away with, the opposition is also testing what works, and adjusting as we go. Trump offended some very powerful interests with his tariff fiasco. He got an electoral rebuke in Wisconsin, and another one in Canada. The honeymoon with the press is starting to wear thin. No doubt he has already done a lot of damage, and will continue to do so, but the more he does the more he exposes his moral and political bankruptcy, and that can only draw more opposition.

  • Martina Burtscher: [04-30] How Trump 2.0 Overturned Years of Climate Progress in 100 Days.

  • John Cassidy: [04-28] From "America First" to "Sell America": "Donald Trump's first hundred days have been an unprecedented economic fiasco."

  • Thomas B Edsall: [04-22] Trump Is Insatiable. That's possibly the single most damning thing you can say about a political figure. You're admitting that you can't deal with him rationally. Sooner or late, the only recourse you're left with is to stop him. Needless to say, it doesn't take many paragraphs before the Hitler analogies start appearing. There may well be many differences between Trump and Hitler, but insatiability is the one big thing them have in common, and the one thing no one can afford to overlook. Also:

    • Thomas B Edsall: [04-29] How Does a Stymied Autocrat Deal With Defeat? My first reaction was that Hitler slunk into his bunker and killed himself (right after killing the newlywed Eva Braun), but Edsall doesn't go there. He solicits input from his usual circle of consultants, who offer bits of insight like "Trump is a coward who has convinced the world he is brave." That's one vote for retreat, but the only one.

  • Ed Kilgore: [09-29] Trump Wasted First 100 Days on Indulging His MAGA Base. "The 47th president could have build a successful administration from his 2024 victory." Not really. Not only was competence not in his nature, it would have been off-brand. Perhaps some other Republican would have used the office to exploit the Democrats' bipartisanship instincts, secure in the knowledge that the Republican attack machine would cut him some slack, but with Trump it was always going to be all about the graft. The only question would be how discrete it would be, or as it turns out, how obviously stupid and insanely chaotic? Which leads us to:

    • Errol Louis: [04-29] What Will It Take to Stop Politicians From Insider Trading? "From Donald Trump to MTG, corruption is taking on new heights." The answer is probably the end of capitalism and the containment of ego, neither of which seems thinkable let alone possible. Of course, voters could ultimately hold politicians responsible for serving in the public interest, but the entire system, including the media, is stacked against that.

  • Michael Kruse: [04-28] The Worst Hundred Days: This starts with notes on FDR's 100 days, LBJ's substantial but somewhat slower legislative accomplishments, and Eisenhower's rather different approach to his first 100 days, and finds Trump faring poorly by every measure.

  • Andrew Marantz: [04-28] Is It Happening Here? "Other countries have watched their democracies slip away gradually, without tanks in the streets. That may be where we're headed -- or where we already are." Longer and deeper than a mere "100 day" review, but that's what the Trump piece amounts to, against a backdrop of Orbán and How Democracies Die.

  • Schuyler Mitchell: [04-29] How Trump's 100 Days Built Off the Far Right Blueprint of Project 2025.

  • David Remnick: [04-27] One Hundred Days of Ineptitude: "Now we know that Donald Trump's first term, his initial attempt at authoritarian primacy, was amateur hour, a fitful rehearsal."

  • Silky Shah: [04-28] Trump's First 100 Days Show Immigrant Jails Are Authoritarian Testing Grounds.

  • Alex Shephard: [04-29] Think Trump's Unpopular Now? Just Wait.

  • Michael Tomasky: [04-28] In 100 Days, Trump Has Invented Something New: Clown-Show Fascism.

  • Nate Weisberg: [04-28] Donald Trump Is Following the Sam Brownback Playbook: "The former Kansas governor's radical economic agenda undermined the state's prosperity, decimated vital government services, tanked his popularity, and put a Democrat in power. Could the same fate await the current president?" I don't think this piece is very accurate in terms of what Brownback did and Trump is doing, nor in terms of prognosis: true that Kansas elected a Democratic governor after Brownback left to work in the Trump State Department, and true that he was pretty unpopular when he left, but Republicans retained control of the state legislature, often with "veto-proof" majorities.

  • Nathan J Robinson: [01-20] Do We Need a Second New Deal? This has nothing to do with the 100 days assessment, but it does give you a pretty good sense of how Roosevelt managed his first 100 days and the whole New Deal, so is worth a mention here.

Let's close with a quote from Carlos Lozada: The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, p. 61, from 2015, when he read "The Collected Works of Donald Trump":

Instead, I found . . . well, is there a single word that combines revulsion, amusements, respect, and confusion? That is how it feels, sometimes by turns, often all at once, to binge on Trump's writings. Over the course of 2,212 pages, I encountered a world where bragging is breathing and insulting is talking, where repetition and contradiction come standard, where vengefulness and insecurity erupt at random.

Elsewhere, such qualities might get in the way of the story. With Trump they are the story. There is little else. He writes about his real estate dealings, his television show, his country, but after a while that all feels like an excuse. The one deal Trump has been pitching his entire career -- the one that culminates in his play for that most coveted piece of property, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- is himself.

I don't want to quibble, but I'm having trouble fitting "respect" into this puzzle. Everything else, sure, and you could skip 2,000 pages and still get there. There is much more quotable here, but it looks like you can find the original article here. For a more recent reading of Trump's oeuvre, see John Ganz: [04-07] Dog Eat Dog: "The books of Donald Trump." Most of us know orders of magnitude more about Trump now than we did ten years ago, but with little more than his ghost-written books, Lozada's picture is already as complete and astute as Ganz's. That suggests he's extraordinarily shallow and transparent to anyone who gives him the least bit of critical thought. Which leaves one wondering why millions of voters can't see through him? Or do they just not care?

Current count: 180 links, 11956 words (14518 total)

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Thursday, April 17, 2025

Loose Tabs

I wound up spending much of today processing and responding to the news that Francis Davis has died. Nate Chinen's piece, cited below, is beautifully written and covers much of what needs to be said. I will probably write more over the next couple weeks, but at the moment, I'm having trouble composing myself. I do much appreciate the notes I've seen so far, and will go back over them in due course. One side effect of this is that I took a good look at obituaries so far this year, and came up with the fairly long list below. The biggest surprise for me was another notable jazz critic, Larry Appelbaum, who has voted in every Jazz Critics Poll since its inception, so I counted him as another old and dear friend.

As these occasional posts are never really done, their timing is pretty arbitrary. But I figured I had enough saved up, and might as well call it a day. (Well, it slipped a day, so I wound up adding a few things, but nothing major.)

PS: I updated the section on Francis Davis below, as the New York Times proved better late than never. I've added a sidebar link to Loose Tabs, which should make it easier for me to start each one of these with some line like "it's been 11 days since my last confession." I have a draft file to collect items until next next time. While it will be updated whenever I bother to update the website, but there's no real reason to not to make the link public. (There is also one for books.) One piece I want to go ahead and share here is:

Select internal links:

Eric Levitz: [01-10] Have the past 10 years of Democratic politics been a disaster? "A conversation with Matthew Yglesias." I found this tab open from back in January, but never really got through it, and still haven't. At some point, I want to go back over all of Levitz's "Rebuild" pieces, as I think they're about half right, and the wrong half is probably the more interesting, at least to write about. Given the interviewee, this one is probably more than half wrong.

Yglesias is a very smart, very productive guy who has from the very beginning always been one step ahead of where internet punditry is going. I read all of his Vox stuff with great interest, most of what came before, but not a lot of what came after. He's always had a good feel for where the neoliberal money was going, and with his Substack newsletter, his Bloomberg columns, and his hyper-Friedmanesque One Billion Americans book, he's clearly arrived as an oracle for the cosmopolitan liberal set. Still, in glomming onto his own special donor class, he's kind of lost touch with everyone else. His prescription that what Democrats need is to give up on the left gestures of Hillary-Biden-Harris and return to solid Obama moderation is incredible on every front.

David Klion: [03-10] The Loyalist: "The cruel world according to Stephen Miller." Review of Jean Guerrero's book, Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.

Jeremy R Hammond: [03-27] How Trump Greenlighted the Resumption of Israel's Gaza Genocide.

David A Graham: [04-01] The Top Goal of Project 2025 Is Still to Come: "The now-famous white paper has proved to be a good road map for what the administration has done so far, and what may yet be on the way." Note that Graham has a 160 pp. book on this coming out April 22: The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America.

Hamilton Nolan: [04-01] Divergence From the Interests of Capital: "Trump will ultimately make rich people poorer. Why?" This is a fairly quick overview, and he didn't even get to some big things, like climate change. Just who do you think owns all that beach front property that's going to get liquidated? Who needs to be able to afford disaster insurance? What about capital investments in in things like agriculture that will have to move as climates shift? And then, when it all goes to hell, whose heads will be on the line when the mob rises up? Since Clinton, Democrats have been telling their rich donors that they're better off with Democrats in power, and they have at least 30 years of data to prove their point. But are the rich listening? Some, but most still prefer the Republicans, because by degrading and humiliating the poor, they make the rich feel more important, more powerful, richer.

Batya Unger-Sargon: [04-02] I Used to Hate Trump. Now I'm a MAGA Lefty. "The president is giving the working class its best shot at the American Dream in 60 years. That's why I support him." That's all I could read before hitting the paywall -- looks like "TheFreePress" isn't free after all.Author "appears regularly on Fox News," and has published two books: Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy (2021), and Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women (2024), both on right-wing Encounter Books. For more of her spiel, look here. If you want to take this more seriously than it deserves:

Ben Ehrenreich: [04-03] You Don't Get Trump Without Gaza: "Fascism doesn't just appear. It must be invited in -- and the bipartisan repression of the anti-genocide movement did just that." This is a brilliant piece, setting up its main argument with a recap of Brecht's Arturi Ui, about the improbable rise of a Trump-like -- sure, he was thinking of Hitler, but he hadn't seen Trump yet -- to take over Chicago gangland's "Cauliflower Trust":

Rot, famously, starts at the top. Joe Biden, sleepy guardian of empire and whatever remained of the liberal world order, had stayed comatose on nearly every issue of import to his constituents. But the genocide seemed to bring him briefly and sporadically back to life. It was as if funding and propagandizing for Israel's slaughter were the only aspect of the job that still got his blood moving. He was, as Brecht wrote of Dogsborough, "Like an old family Bible nobody'd opened for ages--till one day some friends were flipping through it and found a dried-up cockroach between the pages." The rest of the political establishment, Democrats and Republicans both, didn't need to be told to follow Biden's lead. The very few exceptions -- we see you, Cori, Ilhan, Rashida -- were disciplined and marginalized.

In an extraordinary show of class unity for a nation supposedly irreparably divided on party lines, our homegrown Cauliflower Trust closed ranks. It was almost as if American upper management, regardless of religion or politics, instinctively understood that maintaining the right of an ethnocratic settler-colonial outpost to exterminate an unruly subject population was essential to its own survival. Or perhaps they were more cunning and saw a ready-made opportunity to take down the left.

The major newspapers, television networks, and virtually all the prestige magazines did their part, boosting the credibility of nearly every outrageous lie invented by Israeli military propagandists while smearing protesters as antisemites, Hamas stooges, and terrorist sympathizers. "It doesn't matter what professors or smart-alecks think," pronounced Brecht's Arturo Ui, "all that counts is how the little man sees his master." . . .

And here we are. The obscene weaponization of antisemitism helped bring actual Nazis to power.

Much more quotable here, including "The Atlantic, the thinking man's propaganda organ for the exterminatory wars of empire." I don't recall reading that particular Brecht play, but I've read many, and recognize the title. In my relative ignorance, I've been thinking of Trump more in terms of Ubu Roi, but farce, no matter how grotesque, can only last in an environment deprived of power.

Ofer Aderet: [04-04] Looking Back, Israeli Historian Tom Segev Thinks Zionism Was a Mistake: "For decades, historian Tom Segev has critically documented momentous events involving Jews, Israel and its neighbors. Recently, he has also looked back at his own life story. Now, at 80, he weighs in on the current state of the nation."

Yair Rosenberg: [04-04] Trump's Jewish Cover Story: "The Trump administration has not surgically targeted these failings at America's universities for rectification; it has exploited them to justify the institution's decimation." I have no doubt that most Jews in America -- perhaps even most of those who wholeheartedly defend Israel's decimation of Gaza -- feel uneasy about being used as the pretext for Trump's wholesale attack on freedom of speech at elite universities, but the author doesn't just say that, he repeats blatant slanders -- e.g., "those behind Columbia's encampment repeatedly cheered Hamas's murders of civilians" -- against students whose "crime" was nothing more or less than protesting against Netanyahu's continuing systematic crimes against humanity in Gaza, and the unconditional support Biden provided (a policy which Trump has continued, as he had promised to do).

Rob Lee: [04-06] We Still Live in Nixonland: An Interview with Rick Perlstein. Some interesting notes on his writing process, although it's hard to imagine the massive notes his actual books are reduced from. Still no date on the much-promised leap into the "last 25 years" (Bush II to Trump, skipping Reagan's presidency, Bush I, and the anti-Clinton insanity, which could easily fill several volumes).

Spencer Ackerman: [04-07] El Salvador and the Dark Lessons of Guantanamo: "CECOT, the Salvadoran slavery-prison now used for migrant renditions, reflects 2002-4-era Gitmo -- with some updates."

John Ganz: [04-07] Dog Eat Dog: "The books of Donald Trump." One of those "I read this shit so you don't have to," in case you ever felt the need. Also:

Andrew Cockburn: [04-07] The fix is in for new Air Force F-47 -- and so is the failure: "Just wait for the unstoppable lobby preventing any future effort to strangle this boondoggle in the cradle."

Paul Krugman:

  • [04-07] Political Styles of the Rich and Clueless: "There are none so blind as those that will not see." This is the first time I've read Krugman on Substack, and it's about par for his New York Times columns. Best line: "great power often enables great pettiness." Which itself is kind of petty given what Trump and Musk levels of power have been doing.

  • [04-10] Trump Is Stupid, Erratic and Weak.

  • [04-13] Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy? "Trump's tariffs are a disaster. His policy process is worse." This explains the formula used for calculating each nation's tariffs (aside from the 10% minimum, applied even to uninhabited islands where trade is already perfectly balanced at zero).

  • [04-16] Why Trump Will Lose His Trade War: "His people don't know what they're doing or what they want."

  • [04-17] Law Firms, Trade Wars and the Weaknesses of Monarchs: "Unrestrained presidential power will diminish America." I have no idea how these pro bono law services deals are going to work -- who is going to decide which cases they cover, and why -- but they are deeply disturbing. I don't even know what the threat was that compelled large, independent firms to cave in like they did. The gist seems to be that Trump is personally running an off-the-books slush fund, which the companies are feeding, either to gain favor or for fear of some kind of reprisal. I'm not aware of anything remotely like this ever being done before. Krugman cites two articles, which don't help much:

Richard Silverstein: [04-08] Why the world should boycott Trump's America. I understand the sentiment, but I'm not sure the logic works. Boycotts are more likely to cause self-harm than to intimidate their targets, especially ones that pile arrogance on top of a sense of victimhood. Israel is the prime example here, but the US shares both traits, plus two more novel factors: massive size, which would take an incredibly huge boycott to move, and heterogeneity (for lack of a better word), which makes it hard to focus pain on the people actually responsible for the offense. No nation is democratic enough that inflicting pain on its poor will have any real effect on its leaders. Boycotts and sanctions are more likely to rally support for the rulers, while marginalizing internal opposition, and squandering any influence and leverage you might actually have. The cases where such tactics have actually worked are few and far between. About the only thing that can be said for them is that they give one the satisfaction (or moral smugness) of doing something where there are no practical alternatives. On the other hand, if one actually does have leverage -- as, say, Japan does in hosting US bases, or the US does in supplying Israel arms -- wouldn't it be much better to use that leverage to mitigate bad behavior than to strike a mere public stance of moral merit?

Vanesse Ague: [04-09] Big Ears Festival 2025 Reminds Us to Open Ourselves to Wild and Wonderful Sounds.

TJ Dawe: [04-09] I Didn't Think Things Would Get This Chaotic When We Elected President Donkey Kong: I'm not sure whether the quality of thinking declined dramatically in 2024 or was never really there in the first place. It could just be that we were lulled into complacency, knowing that even "the most powerful person in the world" wouldn't possibly be allowed to disrupt, much less destroy, business as usual. After all, we had "checks and balances" -- not just a Constitution designed to obstruct change, but a system of campaign finance and lobbying to make sure no reform got too radical. After all, the system had proven robust enough to contain Trump in his first term. Why not let the people have some fun with the illusory power of their votes?

I'm not into politics. Never have been. That's why it was so refreshing to have a candidate who wasn't the same old same old, but a raging animated ape.

Donkey Kong might not be the most sophisticated public speaker, but it sure was entertaining to go to his rallies. None of the usual bunk about policy and budgets. Just two hours of roaring and chest-pounding. No one gets a crowd going like that monkey! Or donkey. Whatever he is.

But for all the talk from pundits about how we'd see a new side of Donkey Kong once he took office, well, not so much. Turns out we got exactly what we voted for.

Some of this I can explain through a model that I've long had about how the presidency operates. At first, the job seems overwhelming, so an incoming president is effectively a prisoner of his staff. Sure, they're supposed to be his staff, but they immediately become independent agents, able to limit and filter his choices, and each new person they get him to pick further limits his options. I could give you examples from any presidency since FDR (who, for reasons we don't need to go into here, was a rather different case from another era), but Trump I offers by far the most ludicrous examples, starting with Reince Priebus and the so-called "adults" -- at least they were able to derail some of Trump's more outrageous whims, like H-bombing hurricanes, or "solving" the pandemic by no longer counting deaths.

Still, over time, presidents reclaim the power of the office, which in principle they had all along. They tune out tasks they can delegate, and start to press for their own way on matters they care about. Even the most devious staff remind them they're in control, and they can replace anyone who doesn't suit them. Where most presidents start with administrations of old party regulars, they gradually wind up with personality cults. Clinton and Obama offer good examples of this -- which is probably why their personal successes correlate with partisan ruin -- but they at least valued competency. Trump demands even more sycophancy, but with him it's untethered to reality. Trump may be some kind of genius at political messaging -- at least in the Fox universe -- but that's all he knows and/or cares about.

This model usually works smoothly through a second term, but before that ends, the president has turned into a lame duck, and often not just metaphorically, dulling the ego inflation. Some presidents (like Wilson, Eisenhower, and less dramatically Reagan) are further slowed by health issues. But Trump, at least for the moment, is supercharged. His four years out of office have given him all the publicity he had as president but saddled him with none of the responsibility for the many things he would have screwed up. It also gave Republicans time to sort themselves out so Trump has been able to start his second term with a full slate of fanatic followers and enables. This is a combination we've never seen before, and hardly anyone is prepared for what's coming. Donkey Kong is a fanciful metaphor for what's happening. It only seems funny because we know it's not real. But it's hard to come up with anything more real that more accurately reflects the depth of thought that Trump is putting in, because nothing like this has ever worked before.

Melissa Gira Grant: [04-10] The sickening Reason Trump's Team Treats ICE Raids Like Reality TV: "This isn't only about entertainment for sadists. Kristi Noem's right-wing content creation allows the administration to terrorize more people than then can logistically deport." The one thing you can be sure of with Trump is that if he/they do something that looks bad, that's because they want it to look bad. Thinking through implications and consequences is way beyond them, but they live and breathe for gut reactions.

Timothy Noah: [04-10] The Sick Psychology Behind Trump's Tariff Chaos: "This isn't trade strategy. It's Munchausen syndrome by proxy." Clever, but groping for reasoning where little exists.

Eric Levitz: [04-10] The problem with the "progressive" case for tariffs: "Democrats shouldn't echo Trump's myths about trade." I've been somewhat inclined to humor Trump on the tariff question, not because I thought he had a clue what he was doing, or cared about anything more than throwing his presidential weight around, but because I've generally seen trade losses as bad for workers, and because I've never trusted the kneejerk free trade biases of economists. The one caution I always sounded was that tariffs only make sense if you have a national economic plan designed to take advantage of the specific tariffs. That sort of thing has been done most successfully in East Asia, but Americans tend to hate the idea of economic planning (except in the war industry), so there is little chance of doing that here. (Biden's use of tariffs to support clean energy development, semiconductors, etc., tried to do just that. How successfully, I don't know, but they were sane programs. Trump's is not.)

Nonetheless, Levitz has largely convinced me, first that tariffs are a bad tool, and second that they are bad politics. If I had to write a big piece, I'd probably explain it all differently, but our conclusions would converge. There are other tools which get you to the ends desired much more directly. As for the politics, it really doesn't pay to humor people like Trump. We went through a whole round of this in the 1980s and 1990s when conservatives were all hepped up on markets, and Democrats thought, hey, we can work with that. Indeed, they could -- markets tend to level out, making choices more competitive and efficient, so it was easy to come up with policies based on market mechanisms, like carbon credit trading, or the ACA.

Several problems there: one is that real businesses hate free markets, which is why they do everything possible to rig them, and dismantling their cheats is even harder once you agree to the market principle in the first place; second is that it shifts focus from deliberate public interest planning, where you can simply decide to do whatever it is you want to do, and the "invisible hand," which turns out to require a lot of greasing of palms; third is that when you implement market-based reforms, folks credit the market and not the reformers, so you don't build up any political capital for fixing problems. Obama got blamed for every little hiccup in ACA, most of which were the result of private companies gaming the system, and got none for delivering better health care while saving us billions of dollars, which the program actually did do.

One of the points I should have worked in above is that Trump's tariffs are not going to produce "good manufacturing jobs." Even if he does manage to generate more domestic manufacturing, it will only be in highly automated plants with minimally skilled workers, who will have little if any union leverage. And even that is only likely to happen after the companies have shaken down government at all levels for tax breaks and subsidies, along with the promise of continuing tariffs to keep their captive market from becoming uncompetitive.

I should also note that the main problem with the trade deals that Clinton and Obama negotiated had nothing to do with reducing tariffs. The real problem was that they were designed to facilitate capital outflows, so American finance capital (much of which, by the 1990s, was coming back from abroad) could globalize and protect their business interests from regulation by other countries, while ensuring that other countries would have to pay patent and copyright tribute to IP owners. The result was a vast expansion of inequality not just in the US but everywhere.

On the other hand, if what we wanted to do was to reduce inequality and improve standards of living everywhere, a good way to start would be by negotiating a very different kind of trade deal, as Stiglitz has pointed out in books like Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development (2006), and Making Globalization Work (2006).

Sasha Abramsky: [04-11] America Is Now One Giant Milgram Experiment: Back in the 1960s, Stanley Milgram "sought to understand whether ordinary Americans could be convinced to inflict pain on strangers -- in the parameters of the experiment, escalating electric shocks -- simply because a person in authority ordered them to do so." He found that they could, would, and did, which is to say they'd be as willing to follow Nazi leaders as "the Good Germans" under Hitler. This is one more facet of why the Trump/Fascism analogies continue to haunt us. Sure, Hitler was sui generis, but the history of his and others' fascist regimes has many parallels with right-wing reactionaries here and now.

Liza Featherstone: [04-11] Why Billionaire Trumpers Love This Dire Wolf Rubbish: "No, dire wolves are not 'back.' But pretending they can be brought back is a good excuse to gut regulations that protect real endangered species."

  • DT Max: [04-07] The Dire Wolf Is Back: "Colossal, a genetics startup, has birthed three pups that contain ancient DNA retrieved from the remains of the animal's extinct ancestors. Is the wooly mammoth next?"

Cory Doctorow: [04-11] The IP Laws That Stop Disenshittification: I trust I'm not alone in not being able to parse that title. The main subject is anticircumvention laws, which are extensions to IP laws (patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc.) which prevent you not only from copying and/or reselling products, they also aim to keep you from figuring out how they work, especially so you can repair them. Personally, I'd go even further, and tear down the entire IP edifice. But laws that force you to serve the business interests of monopolists are especially vile, on the level of slavery.

Melody Schreiber: [04-11] Measles Is Spreading, and RFK Jr. Is Praising Quacks: "For every semi-endorsement of vaccines, the Health and Human Services secretary seems to add several more nonsensical statements to muddy the waters."

Alan MacLeod: [04-11] With Yemen Attack, US Continues Long History of Deliberately Bombing Hospitals. The history lesson goes back to "Clinton's war on hospitals," and on into Latin America. Other articles found in this vicinity, by MacLeod and others:

  • [02-18] USAID Falls, Exposing a Giant Network of US-Funded "Independent" Media. I'm reminded here that genocide historian Samantha Power was head of USAID under Biden, which raises questions about the corruption of power (to what extent did her political career move her from critic to enabler of genocide?). Turns out, I'm not the first to have wondered (and turns out, she did):

    • Jon Schwarz: [2023-12-15] Samantha Power Calls on Samantha Power to Resign Over Gaza: "If Power, the USAID administrator, would take her own genocide book seriously, she would step down over Israel's assault on Palestine." Power didn't resign, and remained head of USAID until Jan. 20, 2025, when Trump was inaugurated.

    • Christopher Mott: [2024-01-23] The Gaza war is the final nail in the coffin of R2P [Responsibility to Protect]: "The doctrine [advocated by Samantha Power] was always a la carte, evident in the silence of the most strident humanitarian interventionists today."

    • John Hudson: [2024-01-31] USAID's Samantha Power, genocide scholar, confronted by staff on Gaza: "A prominent advisor to President Biden, Power was challenged publicly over the administration's policy, with one employee saying it has 'left us unable to be moral leaders'."

    • Jonathan Guyer: [2024-10-04] The Price of Power: "America's chief humanitarian official rose to fame by speaking out against atrocities. Now she's trapped by one."

    • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [2024-12-19] 'Humanitarian superstar' Samantha Power admits Gaza is a loss.

    • Robbie Gramer/Eric Bazail-Eimil: [01-19] What Samantha Power Regrets and Her Advice to the Trump Administration: "Here's an exit interview with America's top aid official after confronting a turbulent series of humanitarian crises." There's much we can deride or even ridicule here, but two quotes jump out at me: "Well I'm looking forward to hearing who my successor will be." Of course, there is no successor, as the department has been demolished. Such naivete was endemic, even among establishment insiders whose very careers depended on recognizing what was happening. And on Israel: "US policy about events on the ground, the work has mattered and the work has made a difference. Has it made enough of a difference? Without that pushing, a horrific situation would have been even worse." This sounds like something one might say about Auschwitz, which by forcing people to work allowed some to survive, as opposed to Treblinka, which was a pure killing machine that nobody escaped. But rather than dwell on the fine line between what happened and how much worse it could have been without the humanitarian anguish of the Biden administration, the more important point is that by not ending the war well before the election, Biden has left it as unfinished business for Trump, who has zero humanitarian compassion, virtually assuring that the situation will become even more dire, and ultimately even more shameful for the Israelis responsible for it, and for the Americans who enabled it.

  • [02-28] Chainsaw Diplomacy: Javier Milei's Argentina Destruction Is Nightmarish Model for Musk, DOGE.

  • [03-25] Betar: The Far-Right Hate Group Helping Trump Deport Israel's Critics: I was surprised to find that Jabotinsky's fascist group from the 1930s still exists, although it's probably a revival, like the iterations of the Ku Klux Klan.

  • Chris Hedges: [04-14] Israel Is About to Empty Gaza.

  • Robert Inlakesh: [04-17] Before Trump Bombed Yemen, Biden Displaced Over Half a Million People -- and No One Said a Word.

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-11] Roaming Charges: Who Shot the Tariffs? Short answer to his question is: the bond market. Wasn't that the same excuse Clinton gave for his lurch to the right after winning in 1992? (Although he has a long quote showing that Clinton's "lurch" was lubricated by Wall Street money at least a year earlier.) One quote: "Trump's really emphasizing the poor in Standard and Poor's, as if he wants to make Poor the new Standard." Another: "Those MAGA people are going to be so broke after Trump's tariffs start to bite they'll have to rent the libs instead of owning them." Also:

Dean Baker: [04-13] The Trump Plan: Unchecked Power to Total Jerks: Of many posts worth reading this week, we'll start with the highest-level, most self-evident title. Also see, all by Baker:

George Monbiot: [04-13] Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature: And which truth is that? He blames economic inequality, and I have no doubt that's the underappreciated problem, but what is the mechanism by which impoverished people gravitate toward demagogues who will only make them poorer and more miserable?

Garrett Graff: [04-15] Has America Reached the End of the Road? "Donald Trump has forced the one crisis that will tell us who we are." Author calls his blog Doomsday Scenario. (Graff's book Raven Rock was about Cold War plans to preserve essential elements of government in the event of nuclear war.) I'm afraid I'm a bit jaundiced regarding posts like this: I've been watching the train wreck of American democracy at least since the mid-1960s, so I tend to be a bit impatient with people who only think to scream right now. Many similar posts on the site, if you still need to catch up (and yes, it's serious this time, not that it ever wasn't). I was steered to this one by No More Mister Nice Blog, which continues as one of the best blogs anywhere:

Ed Kilgore:

  • [04-16] Team Trump's Addiction to Overkill: This one is fairly easy: they want to be seen as making emphatic moves, because they think their fan base wants to see bold commitment. They're less into actually breaking things that will come back to haunt them. The more they overreach, the more likely they will fail, but that not only shows how hard they're working, but how deviously hysterical, and how entrenched, their enemies are.

  • [04-15] Trump Sees Defying Courts on Deportations As Good Politics. Why let details like legalilty get in the way of a good PR stunt?

  • [04-14] MAGA's Class Warfare Against Knowledge Workers Is Personal: The picture identifies Trump and Musk as "the Marx and Engels of the MAGA revolution." Note that the class doing the warring is the one on top, pushing back and kicking down at the idea that their lessers should think it their job to think for themselves.

Nia Prater: [04-16] The Trump Administration Starts Targeting Democrats for Prosecution: First up, NY Attorney General Letitia James.

Nate Chinen: [04-16] Francis Davis, a figurehead of jazz criticism, has died. This is a very substantial review of the eminent jazz critic's life and work, published before I could even compose myself to post a brief notice on the Jazz Critics Poll website. I will try to write something more in due course, but start here.

A couple more obituaries for Davis:

As I collect more of these, I'll add them to the notice here. At some point, I'll add a few words of my own, and find them a more permanent home.

Obituaries: [04-16] Back when I was doing this weekly, I wound up having enough notable obituaries to have a regular section. Since I stopped -- not just writing but reading newspapers -- I've been blissfully ignorant of lots of things I had previously tracked (not least the NBA season; I only looked up who was playing in the Super Bowl the day before, when my wife anounced her intention to watch it). However, I did finally take a look at the New York Times Obituary page today. I only decided to collect a list here after I ran across a surprise name that I felt I had to mention (long-time jazz critic Larry Appelbaum; I started the search looking for Francis Davis, whose obituary wasn't available, but should be soon). So I've gone back and combed through the page to compile a select list (or two, or three). The first just picks out people I know about, but who (in general) weren't so famous that I knew they had died. The second are more people I wasn't aware of, but possibly should have been, so I can partially compensate by bringing them to your attention. Finally, the third is just a checklist of names I did recognize but didn't include in the first two.

Second list (names I wasn't aware of but who seemed especially noteworthy):

Finally, other names I recognize (no links, but easy enough to look up; * don't have NYT obituaries but noted in Wikipedia and/or Jazz Passings), grouped roughly by categories: Actors/Movies: Richard Chamberlain, Gene Hackman, Val Kilmer, David Lynch, Joan Plowright, Tony Roberts; Music: Eddie Adcock, Susan Alcorn, Roy Ayers, Dave Bargeron, Clem Burke, Jerry Butler, Marianne Faithfull, Roberta Flack, George Freeman*, Irv Gotti, Bunky Green*, Garth Hudson, David Johansen, Gwen McRae, Melba Montgomery, Sam Moore, Mike Ratledge*, Howard Riley*, Angie Stone, D'Wayne Wiggins, Brenton Wood*, Peter Yarrow, Jesse Colin Young; Politics: Richard L Armitage, David Boren, Kitty Dukakis, Raul M Grijalva, J Bennett Johnston, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Alan K Simpson; Sports: George Foreman, Lenny Randle, Boris Spassky, Jeff Torborg, Bob Uecker, Bob Veale, Fay Vincent, Gus Williams; Writers (Fiction): Barry Michael Cooper, Jennifer Johnston, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tom Robbins, Joseph Wambaugh; Writers (Non-Fiction): Edward Countryman, Jesse Kornbluth, David Schneiderman.

Saree Makdisi: [04-17] Trump's War on the Palestine Movement Is Something Entirely New: "Never before has a government repressed its citizens' free speech and academic freedom so brutally in order to protect an entirely different country." The "different country" bit might be right, but one could counter that under Miriam Adelson they're just separate fronts for the same trust. But everything else we've seen as bad or worse in the post-WWI and post-WWII red scares, including the use of deportation and travel bans. What is most useful here is the reminder that pro-Zionists have been compiling lists and pressing academic institutions to cancel critics of Israel for a long time now.

Current count: 134 links, 7428 words (9320 total)

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Sunday, April 6, 2025

Loose Tabs

Seems like a good day to print out my accumulated file of scraps and links, making use of the one-day window between yesterday's initial attempt at a catch up Book Roundup and tomorrow's regularly scheduled Music Week, before checking out for cataract surgery on Tuesday, and whatever disoriented recovery follows that.

I quit my long-running weekly Speaking of Which posts after the election, figuring I had shot my wad trying to exercise what little influence I might have had, and realizing I had little stomach for what was almost certainly to come. I've usually done a pretty good job of following the news, but I've never been a junkie. I learned early on that the sure sign of addiction was that withdrawal was painful. My wife and her father were news junkies. We took a long car trip to the Gaspé Peninsula once -- quite literally the ends of the earth -- and I noticed how twitchy they became as they were deprived of their news routines (so desperate they clamored even for bits of radio in French they hardly understood; I, of course, had my CD cases, so I usually resisted requests for radio). This became even more clear to me when I spent 4-6 weeks in fall 2008, in Detroit working on her father's house after he passed. I only noticed that the banking system had collapsed one day when I stopped to pick up some food, and glimpsed a bit of TV news where I noticed that the Dow Jones had dropped 5000 points from last I remembered. I had no clue, and that hadn't bothered me in the least.

So I figured I could handle a break, especially in the long stretch of lame duck time between election and inauguration, when speculation ran rampant, and everyone -- morose, paranoid losers as well as the insufferably glib winners -- would only double down on their previous expectations. I had made plenty of pre-election predictions, which would be proven or disproven soon enough. I made some minor adjustments in my final post, nothing where I could that the doom and gloom wasn't inevitable, but also remaining quite certain that the future would be plenty bad. As I was in no position to do anything -- and, let's face it, all my writing had only been preaching to the choir -- I saw nothing else to do.

And I've always been open to doubts, or perhaps just skeptical of certainty. So when, just before the election, my oldest and dearest comrade wrote -- "From what you wrote, I think the Republicans/Trump are not as evil as you think, and the Democrats are not as benign as you hope" -- I felt like I had to entertain the possibility. I knew full well that most of my past mistakes had been caused by an excess of hope -- in particular, that the far-from-extravagant hopes I once harbored for Clinton and Obama had been quickly and thoroughly dashed. (Curiosly, Biden entered with so little expectations that I found myself pleasantly surprised on occasion, until his war fumbling led him to ruin -- pretty much the same career arc as Lyndon Johnson, or for that matter Harry Truman.) Of course, I could have just as easily have favored the Republicans with hope. On some level even I find it hard to believe that they really want to destroy their own prosperity, or that their wealthy masters will allow them to sink so low.

I also understood a few basic truths that advised patience. One is that most people have to learn things the hard way, through the experience of disaster. This really bothers me, because as an engineer, my job (or really, my calling) is to prevent disasters from happening, but the temptation to say "I told you so" rarely if ever helps, so it's best to start over from scratch. (FDR's New Deal wasn't a masterplan he had before the Crash. His only firm idea after the Crash was that government should do something fast to help people. He found the New Deal by trial and error, but only because he was open to anything that might work, even ideas that others found suspiciously leftish.)

The second is that what people learn from disasters is very hard to predict, as the brain frantically attempts to find new order from the break and dislocation -- which even if generally predicted often differs critically in details. What people "learn" tends very often to be wrong, largely because the available ideas are most often part of the problem. To have any chance of learning the right lessons, one has to be able to respond to the immediate situation, as free as possible of preconceptions. (By "right" I mean with solutions that stand the test of time, not just ones that gain popular favor but lead to further disasters. Japan's embrace of pacifism after WWII was a good lesson learned. Germany's "stab-in-the-back" theory after WWI wasn't.)

The third is that every oppression or repression generates its own distinctive rebellion. Again, there's little value in trying to anticipate what form it will take, or how it will play out. Just be aware that it will happen, prepare to go with (or in some cases, against) the flow. (Nobody anticipated that the response to the Republican's catastrophic loss in 2008 would be the Tea Party -- even those who recognized that all the raw materials were ready to explode couldn't imagine rational beings doing so. This is a poor example in that the disaster felt by Republicans was nothing more than hallucination, whereas Trump is inflicting real pain which even rational people will be forced to respond to, but that only reiterates my point. And perhaps serves as a warning against paranoid overreaction: the Gaza uprising of Oct. 7, 2023, was a real event which caused real pain, but Israel's lurch into genocide, which had seemed inconceivable before despite being fully overdetermined, is another example.)

So I knew not only that the worse Trump became, the sooner and stronger an opposing force would emerge. And I also knew that to be effective, it would have to come from somewhere beyond the reach of my writing. I may have had some ideas of where, but I didn't know, and my not knowing didn't matter. The only thing I'm pretty sure of is that yesterday's Democratic Party leaders are toast. The entire substance of their 2024 campaign (and most of 2020 and 2016) was "we'll save you from Trump," and whatever else one might say about what they did or didn't do, their failure on their main promise is manifest. But I'm happy to let them sort that out, in their own good time. I'm nore concerned these days with understanding the conditions that put us into the pickle where we had to make such terrible choices. And putting the news aside, I'm free now to go back to my main interest in the late 1960s -- another time when partisan politics and punditry was a mire of greater and lesser evils, when the prevailing liberalism seemed bankrupt and defenseless against the resurgent right -- which is to think up utopian alternatives to the coming dark ages.

More about that in due course. But in everyday life, I do sometimes notice news -- these days mostly in the course of checking out my X and Bluesky feeds -- and sometimes notes. They go into a draft file, which holds pieces for eventual blog posts (like this one). I used to keep a couple dozen more/less reliable websites open, and cycle through them to collect links. I still have them open, but doubt I'll hit up half of them in the afternoon I'm allotting to this. So don't expect anything comprehensive. I'm not doing section heads, although I may sublist some pieces. Sort order is by date, first to last.

Mike Konczal: [02-02] Racing the Tariffs: How the Election Sparked a Surge in Auto and Durable Goods Spending in Q4 2024: "An extra 188,500 total cars sold anticipating Trump's tariffs?" I've been thinking about buying a new car for several years now, but simply haven't gotten my act together to go our shopping. Usually, waiting to spend money isn't a bad idea, but this (plus last week's tariff news) makes me wonder if I haven't missed a window. I still have trouble believing that the tariffs will stick: popular opinion may not matter for much in DC, but the companies most affected have their own resources there. By the way, Konczal also wrote this pretty technical but useful piece: [02-14] Rethinking the Biden Era Economic Debate.

Robert McCoy: [03-11] The Right Is Hell-Bent on Weaponizing Libel Law: "The 1964 Supreme Court decision affords the press strong protections against costly defamation lawsuits. That's why a dangerous new movement is trying to overturn it." The idea is to allow deep-pocketed people like Trump to sue anyone who says anything they dislike about them. Even if you can prove what you said is true, they can make your life miserable. This is presented as a review of David Enrich: Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.

Janet Hook: [03-18] Michael Lewis's Case for Government: Lewis's The Fifth Risk was one of the best books written after Trump won in 2016, not least because it was the least conventional. Rather than getting worked up over the threats Trump posed to Americans, he focused on the people who worked for the government, in the process showing what we had to lose by putting someone like Trump in charge. His The Premonition: A Pandemic Story took a similar tack, focusing on little people who anticipated and worked to solve big problems on our behalf. This reviews his new book Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service, a set of profiles of government workers mostly written by his friends.

Thomas Fazi: [03-24] Europe's Anti-Democratic Militarization: "Europe is being swept up in a war frenzy unseen since the 1930s. Earlier this month, the European Union unveiled a massive $870-billion rearmament plan, ReArm Europe." The proximate cause of this is Trump, whose election lends credence to doubts that the US will remain a reliable partner to defend Europe against Russia. These fears are rather ridiculous, as the US is almost solely responsible for turning Russia into a threat, but also because the reason the US became so anti-Russia was to promote arms sales in Eastern Europe (and anti-China to promote arms sales in East Asia, the main theater of Obama's "pivot to Asia"). There are many things one could write about this hideous turn -- Europe has been ill-served by its obeisance to America's increasingly incoherent imperial aims, so the smart thing there would be to become unaligned -- but one key point is that the center-left parties in Europe have given up any pretense of being anti-war, anti-militarist, and anti-imperial, so only the far right parties seem interested in peace. Even if they're only doing so because they see Putin as one of their own, many more people can see that interventionism, no matter how liberal, is tied to imperialism, and they are what's driving refugees to Europe. You shouldn't have to be a bigot to see that as a problem, or that more war only makes matters worse. Or that "defense" is more temptation and challenge than deterrence.

Jeet Heer: [03-25] Group Chat War Plans Provide a Window Into Trump's Mafia State: "American foreign policy is now all about incompetent shakedowns and cover-ups." On the Jeffrey Goldberg "bombshell", the events he reported on, and the subsequent brouhaha, which is increasingly known as the Signal Scandal (or Signalgate), more focused on the lapse of security protocol than on the bad decisions and tragic events those involved wanted to cover up. Jeer reduced this to five "lessons":

  1. Trump is running a mafia state.
  2. Pete Hegseth is a bald-faced liar -- and it doesn't matter.
  3. The war on Yemen made no sense and was conducted without consulting Congress or allies.
  4. The Trump administration really hates Europe -- but stil wants to fight wars on its behalf.
  5. The contradictions of America First are resolved by Mafia-style shakedowns.

Some more articles on this:

Darlene Superville: [03-27] Trump executive order on Smithsonian targets funding for programs with 'improper ideology': Oh great, not only are the federal employees who act as custodians of our national history subject to arbitrary dismissal and possibly rendering, now they have to spend every day of the next four years arguing with Trump's goons about political correctness!

Liza Featherstone: [03-28] Welcome to the Pro-Death Administration: "From climate change to nuclear weapons to lethal disease, the Trump administration seems to have decided that preventing mass death isn't really government's business anymore." Title was too easy, given the anti-abortion cult's "pro-life" conceit. Still, although there are certain kinds of death the Trump administration unabashedly favors -- capital punishment, bombing Yemen, providing blank check support for Israeli genocide -- the clear point of the article is the administration's extraordinary lack of concern for public health and any kind of human welfare. What's hard to say at this point is whether this frees them from any thought about the consequences of their actions, or their thoughtlessnes and recklessness is the foundation, and carelessness just helps them going.

Saqib Rahim: [03-28] Trump's pick for Israel Ambassador Leads Tours That Leave Out Palestinians -- and Promote End of Days Theology: Mike Huckabee, who started as a Baptist minister, became governor of Arkansas, ran for president, and shilled for Fox News, has finally found his calling: harkening the "end of days." Most critics of America's indulgence of Israeli policy find it hard to talk about Christian Zionist apocalypse mongering, probably because it just seems too insane to accept that anyone really believes it, but Huckabee makes the madness hard to ignore. That he's built a graft on his beliefs with his "Israel Experience" tours is news to me, but unsurprising, given the prevalence of conmen in the Trumpist right. On the other hand, "erasing Palestinians" is just par for the course. Huckabee's own contributions there have mostly been symbolic, which doesn't mean short of intent, but as US ambassador he'll be well on his way to an ICC genocide indictment. Too many more horror stories on Israel to track, but these stood out:

Jackson Hinkle: [03-31] tweet: Entire text reads: This is one of the most evil people in history." Followed by picture a smiling (and younger than expected) Barrack Obama. I don't know who this guy is, but he obviously doesn't know jack shit about history, even of the years since his subject became president.[*] But the bigger problem is what happens when you start calling people evil. It's not just that it throws you into all sorts of useless quantitative debates about lesser or greater evils, the whole concept is akin to giving yourself a lobotomy. You surrender your ability to understand other people, and fill that void with a command to act with enough force to get other people to start calling you evil. But to act with such force one needs power, so maybe what's evil isn't the person so much as the power?

[*] Hinkle appears to be a self-styled American Patriot (note flag emoji) with a militant dislike of Israel, succinctly summed up with a picture of him shaking hands with a Yemeni soldier (Google says Yahya Saree) under the title "American patriots stand with Yemen," along with meme posts like "Israel is a terrorist state" and "Make Tel Aviv Palestine again." So I suppose I should give him a small bit of credit for not inventing Obama's "evil" out of whole cloth (like Mike McCormick, whose latest book on Obama and Biden is called An Almost Insurmountable Evil), but all he does is take sides -- his feed also features pure boosterism for Putin and Gaddafi, as if he's trying to discredit himself -- with no substance whatsoever.

Rutger Bregman: [03-31] What I think a winning agenda for Democrats could look like: This was a tweet, so let's quote it all (changing handles for names, for clarity):

  1. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Bernie Sanders-style economic populism. Tax the rich, expand public services, balance the budget. Skip the ideological fluff: no anti-capitalism and degrowth blabla, just good old-fashioned social democracy.
  2. David Shor-style popularism: relentlessly double down on your most popular policies. Universal Pre-K, affordable child care, higher minimum wage, cheaper groceries, cheaper college, cheaper prescription drugs.
  3. Yascha Mounk/Matthew Yglesias-style cultural move to the center: moderate on immigration, tone down identity politics, admit men & women are different, stop the obsessive language policing, explicitly distance yourself from far left cultural warriors. Reclaim patriotism. Be smart on crime: no 'defund the police' but more cops and better cops who solve more crimes. Be the party of cleaner streets, fewer guns, and public order.
  4. Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson-style YIMBY/abundance agenda. Slash red tape, defy silly rules and procedures. Declare an emergency if necessary. Shovels in the ground, make a big show of building affordable housing and clean energy (livestreams etc.). Set targets and deadlines. Be the party of progress that (visibly!) builds.
  5. Build a big tent of progressives, moderates and independents. Unite in opposition to Trump. Attack him when he engages in economic arson (tariffs etc) and democratic arson (blatant disregard for due process, civil liberties etc.), and when it highlights your strengths: competence, solutions, basic human decency.

And most importantly of all:

Win elections. Then do the right thing. (In that order.)

In other words, everybody's right, let's try it all, only, you know, win this time. The thing is, this prescription is pretty much what Harris tried in 2024, and somehow she still lost. Her approximate grade card on these five points: 70/90/90/80/90 -- sure, she could have bashed the rich more, but they reacted as if she did, and Bregman pulls as many punches on this score as she did, so it's hard to see how they could have landed; and her "big tent" extended all the way to Dick Cheney -- the people who were excluded were the ones who had misgivings about genocide (although I suppose the Teamsters also have their own reason to beef).

The problem is that even when Democrats say the right things -- many advocating policies which on their own poll very favorably -- not enough people believe them to beat even the insane clowns Republicans often run these days. Their desperate need is to figure out how to talk to people beyond their own camp, not so much to explain their better policy positions as to dispel the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and establish their own credibility for honesty, probity, reason, respect, and public spirit.

Unfortunately, this isn't likely to happen through introspection. (I remember describing 9/11 as a "wake-up call" for Americans to re-examine their consciences and resolve to treat the world with more respect and care -- and, well, that sure didn't happen.) As Bregman's list of oracles shows, the standard response to a crisis of confidence -- which is the result of the Harris defeat, especially for anyone who believed she was saying and doing the right hings -- isn't self-reflection. It's a free-for-all where everyone competes with their own warmed-over pet prescriptions: the names in 1-4 have been kicking their policy ideas around for years, looking for any opportunity to promote them (although only Sanders and AOC have any actual political juice, which Bregman wants to tap into but not to risk offending his neoliberal allies; 5 is another reminder to water down any threat to change).

I should note Nathan J Robinson's response here:

I see "pretend foreign policy doesn't exist in order to avoid the awkward subject of whether or not Democrats support genocide" continues to be part of the plan.

If Democrats can't figure out that war is bad, not just morally but politically, they will lose, and deserve to lose, no matter how bad their enemies are, even on that same issue. (Sure, it's a double standard: as the responsible, sensible, human party, Democrats are expected to behave while Republicans are allowed to run crazy.) If Democrats can't figure that much out, how can they convince people that public services are better than private, that equal justice for all is better than rigging the courts, that protecting the environment matters, and much more?

By the way, I've read Bregman's book Utopia for Realists, and found it pretty weak on both fronts. (Original subtitle was The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek, which was later changed to And How We Can Get There).

I also saw a tweet where Bregman is raving about the new book, Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I wrote a bit about the book for an unpublished Book Roundup, which I might as well quote here (I'll probably rewrite it later; I haven't committed to reading it yet):

Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson: Abundance (2025, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster): I've seen many references lately to "abundance liberalism," which this seems to be the bible to. It comes at a time when Democrats are shell-shocked by the loss to Trump -- especially those who are congenitally prejudiced against the left, and still hope to double down on the neoliberal gospel of growth. I sympathize somewhat with their "build" mantra, but isn't the problem somewhat deeper than just providing cutting through the permitting paperwork? While it's true that if you built more housing, you could bring prices down, but the neoliberal economy is driven by the search for higher profits, not lower prices. Democrats have been trained to think that the ony way they can get things done is through private corporations (e.g., you want more school loans, so hire banks to administer them; you want better health care for more people, pay off the insurance companies), which is not just wasteful, it invites further sabotage, and the result is you cannot deliver as promised. Similarly, Democrats have been trained to believe that growth is the magic elixir: make the rich richer, and everyone else will benefit. They're certainly good at the first part, but the second is harder to quantify. Perhaps there are some details here that are worth a read, but the opposite of austerity isn't abundance; it's enough, and that's not just a quantity but also a quality.

I should cast about for some reviews here (some also touch on Marc J Dunkelman: Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress -- and How to Bring It Back; other have pursued similar themes, especially Matthew Yglesias):

Jessica Piper/Elena Schneider: [04-02] Why Wisconsin's turnout suggests serious trouble for the GOP right now: 'Democrats keep overperforming in down-ballot elections, and the Wisconsin results suggest it's not just about turnout." I knew that night that Musk's attempt to buy a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin had failed, but I hadn't looked at the numbers, which were pretty huge.

Ori Goldberg: [04-02] tweet:

Reminder:

  1. There is no "war" in Gaza. No one is fighting Israel.
  2. Israel is engaged in eradication. The only justification Israelis need is the totality of the eradication.
  3. Eradication is a crime in every shape or form. Those engaging in it and enabling it are criminals.

I'm also seeing tweets about and by Randy Fine, a Republican who won a House seat from Florida this week. About: "AIPAC's Randy Fine calls for 5 year prison sentences for distributing anti-Israel flyers, calling it a hate crime." By: "There is no suffering adequate for these animals. May the streets of Gaza overflow with blood." I can kind of understand, without in any way condoning or excusing, where Netanyahu and Ben Gvir are coming from, but I find this level of callousness from Americans unfathomable (and note that Lindsey Graham is one reason I'm using the plural).

Sean Padraig McCarthy: [04-02] tweet:

The Zionist project is so extreme, so violent, so beyond the pale of civilization that nothing progressive can coexist with it. It will drag all your pro-worker, pro-healthcare politics into the abyss. We need anti Zionist political leaders.

Matt Ford: [04-03] Take Trump's Third-Term Threats Seriously: Don't. It's hard to tell when he's gaslighting you, because lots of stuff he's serious about is every bit as insane as bullshit like this. The first thing here is timing: this doesn't matter until 2028, by which time he's either dead or so lame a duck that not even the Supreme Court will risk siding with him. But even acknowledging the threat just plays into his paranoid fantasies, a big part of what keeps him going.

Bret Heinz: [04-03] Rule by Contractor: "DOGE is not about waste and efficiency -- it's about privatization." I'm not sure I had a number before, but "Elon Musk spent more than $290 million on last year's elections." That's a lot of money, but it's tiny in comparison to this: "Overall, Musk's business ventures have benefited from more than $38 billion in government support."

Jeffrey St Clair: [04-04] Roaming Charges: Welcome to the Machine. Tariffs, layoffs, etc. I suppose we have to provide a sublist of tariff articles, so I might as well hang it here. Personally, I've never had strong feelings on tariffs or free trade. I have long been bothered by the size of the US trade imbalance, which went negative around 1970, about the time that Hibbert's Peak kicked in and the US started importing oil. I thought that was a huge mistake, that should have been corrected with substantially higher gas taxes (which in addition to throttling consumption and reducing the trade deficit would also have had the effect of blunting the 1970s price shocks). In retrospect, a tariff would have had a similar effect, and probably stimulated more domestic production, which would have had the unfortunate side effect of making oil tycoons -- by far the most reactionary assholes in America -- all that much richer. But tariffs aren't very good for equalizing trade deficits: by targeting certain products and certain nations, they can lead to trade wars, which hurt everyone. A better solution would be a universal tax on all imports, which is keyed to the trade balance. That clearly identifies trade balance as the problem, with a solution defined to match it, and disincentivizes retaliation. Perhaps even easier would be to simply devalue one's currency, which makes imports more expensive (without the clumsiness of a tax) and exports cheaper. But no one talks about these things, probably because few of the people involved seem to worry much about trade imbalances. They have their own reasons, and they don't want to talk about them either.

The classic rationale for tariffs is to protect infant industries from competition from cheaper imports. This makes sense only if you have a national economic plan, which the US has traditionally refused to do. (Biden has actually done things like this; e.g., to promote US manufacturing of batteries, but Trump has no clue here. Republican tariffs in the 19th century effectively did this, although they never called it this.)

Nor do I regard the issue as especially major. I think the people who have sounded the alarm over Trump's tariff plans have often exaggerated the danger. While the immediate effects, like the stock market tumble, seem to justify those fears, if he stays the course, businesses will adjust, and while the damage will still be real, it won't be catastrophic. But it seems unlikely that he will hold out. The reaction from abroad just goes to show how much American power has slipped over recent decades. When Biden was sucking up to Europe and the Far East, they were willing to humor him, because it cost them little, and the predicability was comforting. Trump offers no such comforts, and is so obnoxious any politician in the world can score points against him, or become vulnerable if they don't. While backing down will be embarrassing, not doing so will be perceived as far worse. I don't think he has the slightest clue what he is doing, and I suspect that the main reason he's doing it is because he sees it as a way to show off presidential power. That still plays to his fan base, but more than a few of them are going to get hurt, and he has no answer, let alone sympathy, for them.

A few more articles (hopefully not many, as this is already a dead horse):

David Dayen: [04-04] No Personnel Is Policy: "The Trump administration is accomplishing through layoffs what it couldn't accomplish through Congress."

There are certainly plenty of more normal ways Trump is changing the government, old standbys like hiring lobbyists to oversee the industries they once worked for. But just immobilizing government through staff cuts is somewhat new, at least at the level that Trump has employed it. Prosecutorial discretion is an established way to shift government priorities. But most of these agency depopulations make it impossible for the federal government to fulfill its statutory responsibilities, even though these agencies have been established and authorized and funded by Congress. When you make these offices nonfunctional, you're not taking care that the laws are faithfully executed.

More on Musk and DOGE:

Elie Honig: [04-04] Trump's war on big law. Not that I have any sympathy for the law firms Trump has tried to shake down -- least of all for the ones who so readily surrendered -- but this is one Trump story I had little if any reason to anticipate. Trump must be the most litigious person in world history -- James D Zirin even wrote a book about this, Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits. One good rule of thumb is that anyone involved, even inadvertently, in 1% of that many lawsuits is unfit for office.

Branko Marcetic: [04-04] Trump Promised Free Speech Defense and Delivered the Opposite. Hard to believe that anyone fell for that one.

Nina Quinn Eichacker: [04-05] The End of Exorbitant Privilege as We Know it: Some technical discussion of the pluses and minuses of seeking trade surpluses, noting that the advantages aren't large, and that for an economy as large as the US the costs of running persistent deficits aren't great -- barring some unforseen disaster, which leads to this:

But what the Trump administration seems to really be trying to do is demolish that exorbitant privilege, by torching any desire from countries around the world to purchase goods from the US, and to form economic alliances that insulate them from the chaos coming from inside the US government. People ask me all the time whether I think that there's a point at which the US could have too much debt, and I've always said that something really catastrophic would have to happen for the US to be deposed as the currency hegemon of the world. Now I think we're teetering on the brink, and I hate it.

The author also notes: "Will these tariffs lead to more manufacturing? They're a painful way to get ther, with a lot of degrowth along the way."

Adam Tooze: [04-07] Chartbook 369 Are we on the edge of a major financial crisis? Trump's Chart of Death and why bonds not equities are the big story. I can't say I'm following all of this, but I am familiar with the notion that equity and bond markets normally balance each other out, so the idea that both are way out of whack seems serious. And the odds for the "Trump is a genius" explanation are vanishingly small.

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