Music Week

Music: Current count 28490 [28462] rated (+28), 365 [364] unrated (+1).

Most of the following made its way into July Streamnotes, so not much news to report. Just seven albums in the August draft file so far: Arcade Fire, Hal Galper, Paul Jones, Manchester Orchestra, Vic Mensa, Vieux Farka Touré, Reggie Young. I think I gave Arcade Fire five (maybe six) plays. The others on Napster got one each.

Three of those came out last week. Checking AOTY, they scored: Manchester Orchestra (78/11), Arcade Fire (71/23), Vic Mensa (65/5). I'm surprised Arcade Fire has been reviewed so poorly (although it has 100 scores from NME and The Independent). They're a group I've generally admired but never felt much affection for: while I've graded their previous albums pretty high (B+ for 2004's Funeral; A- for Neon Bible, The Suburbs, and Reflektor), none of those albums scored especially high on my EOY lists (27, 27, 29). I expect this one will wind up lower (it's at 28 now, but we're only about half done -- big question is whether I ever play it again). But critics have generally liked their albums more than I have; e.g., AOTY scores for their four albums are: 95/15, 84/20, 89/33, 78/40; higher still were their Pazz & Jop finishes: 6, 5, 3, 14. Presumably this one won't fare so well, but I can't tell you why. Maybe in this day and age critics want something mopey? (Like Mount Eerie? Or Manchester Orchestra?)

On the other hand, the low critical scores for Vic Mensa's The Autobiography correlate with my disappointment, not that we necessarily agree as to why. Christgau liked his mixtapes, and there was at least something happening in There's Alot Going On. Not that there's nothing I like in Mensa's record; just a lot I don't. That contrasts, say, to Tyler the Creator's new Flower Boy, which was a total blank after one spin. I reckon that's an improvement given how offensive his early albums were. Got to it after the cutoff, so it's not in the list below -- nor is Lana Del Rey's Lust for Life, which I played a lot and like but wound up hedging. "God Bless America -- and All the Beautiful Women in It" may be the kindest patriotic anthem of the year, followed by "When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing" and "Beautiful People Beautiful Problems."

Milo Miles wrout about the remarkable Carl Craig album. Robert Christgau reviewed the Perceptionists and Oddissee (an earlier A- for me) at Noisey. Akmee and Alexander Hawkins are on Chris Monsen's 2017 Favorites list. Ergo, Led Bib, and several others were downloads I've been sitting on for a long time -- Roscoe Mitchell a more recent download. The Eddie Palmieri and Vieux Farka Touré albums are unlikely to disappoint their fans -- high HMs that might make the A- grade if I spent more time with them.

Finished adding the post-2000 vocalists to the Jazz Guide (currently 968 + 747 pages). Stalled when I got into post-2000 instrumentalists (currently 6% done). When I scrolled back to the top, I realized I needed to make some edits in the front matter -- in particular I changed the grade scale so that A or A+ is 10, A- 9, B+ 8-6, B 5, B- 4, C+ 3, C 2, C- or worse 1. I think this maps closer to my actual practice, where A/A+ grades have become extremely rare, as have sub-C grades. I asked several friends about this mapping and pretty much all of them wanted more spread on top (A- = 8) with adjustments shifting some higher grades up to 9 or 10, but I really needed something I could apply more mechanically. I also didn't mind cutting my artists and publicists a bit of slack here, while readers still have a useful curve: 10 is still pretty rare (especially post-2000), and 9 isn't very common (around 10% of the total, which is about what you'd expect in a decile system).

While editing I noticed that I started this project last August, so I've been working on it a full year, during which time I've done very little of the editing that will be needed if this ever sees the light of day, and nothing at all on several other possible book projects. Feels Sisyphean, even as time seems to be running out.

Already looks like it's going to be another good week for another Midweek Roundup. Last week I described Trump as having broke out of his cage and gone on a joyride -- evidence included promoting Anthony Scaramucci, purging Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus, and two of the most embarrassing and disgusting speeches in a career with little else -- but today the joyride ended in a crash as Scaramucci got fired. Now we're going to have to suffer through stories about how Marine General John Kelly restored order and discipline to the White House, as they buckle down on the great cause of "tax reform" -- a more efficient, and less damaging, way to feather the pockets of the very rich than repealing the ACA.

On the other hand, I may be pressed for time for a Sunday Weekend Roundup, as I have a dinner scheduled for Saturday. I've been planning for some time on doing a birthday-sized Korean menu, and will finally get the chance. (I started the classic cabbage kimchi months ago.) Perfect cuisine for a "birthday feast" with all the banchan -- small side dishes, kind of like tapas but they pretty much all get the same treatment. Art Protin told me I should do a full dinner report every few months, so I'll try to follow through on that.

I am trying harder to cook occasional small dinners for just us, and they've often been superb. Last week I made my first-ever lasagna, with sausage and lamb (recipe called for beef and veal, but I didn't find the latter and decided not to make a deep search). I was a bit disappointed in it (certainly compared to the pastitsio I made a while back), but the leftovers are good enough to eat cold, along with a little horiatiki salad.

New records rated this week:

• Akmee: Neptun (2016 [2017], Nakama): [r]: B+(***)
• Arcade Fire: Everything Now (2017, Columbia): [r]: A-
• Richard Dawson: Peasant (2017, Domino): [r]: B
• Ergo: As Subtle as Tomorrow (2013 [2016], Cuneiform): [dl]: B+(***)
• Kevin Eubanks: East West Time Line (2017, Mack Avenue): [r]: B+(*)
• Hal Galper and the Youngbloods: Live at the Cota Jazz Festival (2016 [2017], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Calvin Harris: Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 (2017, Fly Eye/Columbia): [r]: B+(*)
• Joel Harrison: Stump (2013 [2014], Cuneiform): [dl]: B+(***)
• Alexander Hawkins: Unit[e] (2016-17 [2017], self-released, 2CD): [bc]: B+(**)
• Paul Jones: Clean (2017, Outside In Music): [cd]: B
• Steve Lacy: Steve Lacy's Demo (2017, Three Quarter, EP): [r]: B
• Led Bib: The Good Egg (2013 [2014], Cuneiform): [dl]: B+(***)
• Led Bib: The People in Your Neighborhood (2013 [2014], Cuneiform): [dl]: B+(**)
• Let's Eat Grandma: I, Gemini (2016, Transgressive): [r]: B
• Manchester Orchestra: A Black Mile to the Surface (2017, Loma Vista): [r]: B
• Vic Mensa: The Autobiography (2017, Roc Nation): [r]: B-
• Roscoe Mitchell: Bells for the South Side (2015 [2017], ECM, 2CD): [dl]: B+(***)
• Mokoomba: Luyando (2017, OutHere): [r]: B
• The Moonlandingz: Interplanetary Class Classics (2017, Transgressive): [r]: B
• Sam Newsome: Sopranoville: Works for Prepared and Non-Prepared Soprano (2017, Some New Music): [r]: B+(*)
• Oxbow: Thin Black Duke (2017, Hydra Head): [r]: B+(*)
• The Ed Palermo Big Band: Oh No! Not Jazz!! (2014, Cuneiform, 2CD): [dl]: C
• Eddie Palmieri: Sabiduria/Wisdom (2012 [2017], Ropeadope): [r]: B+(***)
• The Perceptionists: Resolution (2017, Mello Music Group): [r]: A-
• Vieux Farka Touré: Samba (2017, Six Degrees): [r]: B+(***)
• Ralph Towner: My Foolish Heart (2016 [2017], ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Reggie Young: Forever Young (2017, Whaling City Sound): [cd]: B+(*)

Old music rated this week:

• Lisbon Improvisation Players: Motion (2002 [2004], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Carol Albert: Fly Away Butterfly (Cahara): September 1
• Julian Gerstin Sextet: The One Who Makes You Happy (self-released): September 1
• Tyshawn Sorey: Verisimilitude (Pi)
• John Vanore: Stolen Moments: Celebrating Oliver Nelson (Acoustical Concepts): August 18
• Matt Wilson: Matt Wilson's Honey and Salt (Palmetto): August 25

Miscellaneous notes:

• Roscoe Mitchell: Bells for the South Side (2015 [2017], ECM, 2CD): B+(***)

Weekend Roundup

I shot most of my war back on Thursday's Midweek Roundup, and have had limited time since then. But still I couldn't ignore these items:

Some scattered links:

• Tariq Ali: Nawaz Sharif has gone. But Pakistan's high-level corruption survives:

  Sharif's party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, is fighting back, accusing the court of a vendetta -- which usually means that his billions could not buy a single judge. This is truly exceptional. Life in Pakistan has not been morally salutary for any of its citizens. The family politics represented by the Bhutto-Zardaris and their rivals, the Sharifs, is swathed in corruption. Each has learned from the other how best to conceal it, minimising paperwork and juggling accounts. Many years ago, when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister, she asked me what people were saying about her. "They're saying your husband is totally corrupt, but are not sure about how much you know . . ."

  She knew all right, and was not in the least embarrassed: "You're so prudish. Times have changed. This is the world we live in. They're all doing it. Politicians in every western country . . ." Her husband, the president-to-be Asif Ali Zardari, was imprisoned by Sharif, but no actual proof of corruption was discovered: Zardari's loyalty to his cronies was legendary, and they remained loyal in return. Sharif, it appears, has been less fortunate.

• Dean Baker: How about a little accountability for economists when they mess up?

• Robert A Blecker: Trump's "America first" strategy for NAFTA talks won't benefit US workers

• Carole Cadwalladr: Al Gore: 'The rich have subverted all reason': Ten years after his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore is back with a sequel and goes beyond simply remind us, "I told you so." One thing he's started looking at is the money:

  "I mean that those with access to large amounts of money and raw power," says Gore, "have been able to subvert all reason and fact in collective decision making. The Koch brothers are the largest funders of climate change denial. And ExxonMobil claims it has stopped, but it really hasn't. It has given a quarter of a billion dollars in donations to climate denial groups. It's clear they are trying to cripple our ability to respond to this existential threat."

  One of Trump's first acts after his inauguration was to remove all mentions of climate change from federal websites. More overlooked is that one of Theresa May's first actions on becoming prime minister -- within 24 hours of taking office -- was to close the Department for Energy and Climate Change; subsequently donations from oil and gas companies to the Conservative party continued to roll in. And what is increasingly apparent is that the same think tanks that operate in the States are also at work in Britain, and climate change denial operates as a bridgehead: uniting the right and providing an entry route for other tenets of Alt-Right belief. And, it's this network of power that Gore has had to try to understand, in order to find a way to combat it.

• Alexia Fernandez Campbell: What McCain did was hard. What Murkowski and Collins did was much harder. I suppose McCain's vote to sink the so-called "skinny repeal" does qualify as "something useful for once" (a prospect I doubted when I cited Alex Pareene's I Don't Want to Hear Another Fucking Word About John McCain Unless He Dies or Actually Does Something Useful for Once). But McCain couldn't have cast the killing vote without Collins and Murkowski consistently voting against all of McConnell's ploys to repeal Obamacare -- in large part because they seem to be the only Republicans who actually care about the bottom-line assessments that the bills would deprive upwards of twenty million Americans of health insurance.

  Through all of this, the backlash against these two women senators was severe. Two House Republicans threatened them with violence.

  President Trump publicly shamed Murkowski on Twitter:

  Senator @lisamurkowski of the Great State of Alaska really let the Republicans, and our country, down yesterday. Too bad!

  Murkowski then got a call from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who reportedly threatened to punish Alaska's economy based on her health care vote, according to the Alaska Dispatch News.

  You might recall that Murkowski actually lost the Republican primary last time out to Tea Party fanatic Joe Miller, then beat Miller with a write-in campaign, so she's entitled to some independence (or maybe she's already written off the hardcore right). It will be interesting to see how much internecine blood is spilt over "repeal-and-replace" and other supposed Republican failures, but Reagan's so-called "eleventh commandment" has long vanished: it seems almost certain that each and every Republican who broke ranks even once will face right-wing primary challengers. Even more amusing is the pouting tantrum from John Daniel Davidson: I'm a conservative -- and I now see voting Republican is a waste of time: "The Obamacare fiasco reveals that once they are in power, Republicans in Washington refuse to deliver on their promises."

• Tom Engelhardt: Bombing the Rubble: "Precision warfare? Don't make me laugh." Also: William D Hartung: The Hidden Costs of "National Security": "Ten ways your tax dollars pay for war -- past, present, and future>"

• William G Gale: The Kansas tax cut experiment: Now that Sam Brownback's moving on to become Trump's Ambassador at Large for Religious Freedom, a position that will better fit his sanctimonious twaddle and hopefully is powerless enough to limit how much real damage (as opposed to mere embarrassment) he does, the Brookings Institute is finally getting around to looking at his late, great signature tax scam (blessed in the beginning by none other than Arthur Laffer, his paid consultant). Some of the bullet points:

  • Under his plan, the tax rate on pass-through business income fell to 0. The idea was to boost investment, raise employment, and jump-start the economy.
  • The Kansas economy did not grow faster than neighboring states, the country itself, or even Kansas' own growth in previous years.
  • The experiment with tax policy was such a failure that a Republican controlled legislature not only voted to raise taxes, but did so over the veto of the governor.
  • Second, a lowered business income tax can be manipulated. While Kansas cut the tax rate on pass-through income to 0 in hopes of promoting economic activity, the growth simply didn't happen. In reality, many people in Kansas re-characterized income from labor into business-form in order to take advantage of the 0 percent tax rate.
  • There are other, more general, takeaways from the tax cut experiment. When Kansas cut taxes, its bond rating went down, and it had to cut central services such as education and infrastructure. After seeing this, a majority of Kansans decided they would not prefer to keep the tax cuts.
  • Therefore, another implication is that tax reform is not just about taxes, rather what taxes pay for. Taxes and spending are linked.

  The tax cuts threw the state into a permanent budget crisis, forcing spending cuts (and other desperate measures which ultimately weakened the state's credit rating) at a time when courts consistently found the state to be violating the requirement (part of the state constitution) to adequately fund local schools. As Republicans try to pass federal "tax reform" they'll be recycling many of the same nostrums Brownback used in Kansas, so beware.

• Jack Gross: The American Model: Book review of James Q Whitman: Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. "What appears to be still difficult, even as it gets told in ever finer detail, is the simple and immense situation that America and Nazi Germany are two instantiations of a single history of white supremacist rule." It's well known that South Africa based its Apartheid legal system on America's Jim Crow laws. The Nazi case is less clear, but Hitler admired America in several respects -- white supremacy is the one detailed here. As I recall, he also saw America's advance across the continent as a model for his own Eastern conquests -- what we proclaimed as Manifest Destiny he called Lebensraum.

• Jim Hightower: Fight for your right to fix your own iPhone: I'm not surprised that Apple is in the forefront of companies seeking to maximize their profits and control of customers by "repair prevention." Actually, I was recently was looking at a Microsoft Surface computer and read that you can't get into it to repair it without destroying the case -- one, I suspected, of many traits they copied from Apple. We live in an age where is it often cheaper to replace something than to repair it, which may be good for various companies but as a society it is wasteful and degrading.

• Mike Konczal: This Small Regulation Shows Us How the Economy Could Work for Everybody: Part of Dodd-Frank the Republicans want to get rid of, because all that regulation limits the ability of big banks to goose up their profits by price-gouging and other fraudulent means.

  

• Peggy Noonan: Trump Is Woody Allen Without the Humor: Unfair to Allen, of course -- I'd rather watch Interiors (possibly the most unfunny movie ever made, not merely the unfunniest by Allen) than a Trump rally speech -- but no one ever looked to Noonan for fair, or for that matter for insight. But as a piece of anti-Trump snark this rivals Maureen Dowd:

  He's not strong and self-controlled, not cool and tough, not low-key and determined; he's whiny, weepy and self-pitying. He throws himself, sobbing, on the body politic. He's a drama queen. It was once said, sarcastically, of George H.W. Bush that he reminded everyone of her first husband. Trump must remind people of their first wife. Actually his wife, Melania, is tougher than he is with her stoicism and grace, her self-discipline and desire to show the world respect by presenting herself with dignity.

  Half the president's tweets show utter weakness. They are plaintive, shrill little cries, usually just after dawn. "It's very sad that Republicans, even some that were carried over the line on my back, do very little to protect their president." The brutes. . . .

  His public brutalizing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions isn't strong, cool and deadly; it's limp, lame and blubbery. "Sessions has taken a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes," he tweeted this week. Talk about projection. . . .

  His inability -- not his refusal, but his inability -- to embrace the public and rhetorical role of the presidency consistently and constructively is weak.

  "It's so easy to act presidential but that's not gonna get it done," Mr. Trump said the other night at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio. That is the opposite of the truth. The truth, six months in, is that he is not presidential and is not getting it done. His mad, blubbery petulance isn't working for him but against him. . . .

  We close with the observation that it's all nonstop drama and queen-for-a-day inside this hothouse of a White House.

  Noonan closes with Anthony Scaramucci ("He seemed to think this diarrheic diatribe was professional"), without making the obvious point: that he's Trump's perfect "communications director" because he recapitulates Trump's own communications style -- just classed up a bit by extending Trump's third-grade vocabulary and grammar into puberty, as if that's all it's going to take to get the snooty sophisticates to stop laughing at him. Noonan cites historian Joshua Zeitz's comment: "It's Team of Rivals but for morons."

  Still, there is no reason to think that Noonan is transitioning into some kind of satirist. It's safe to say she's the same paid political hack she's been since Ronald Reagan signed her checks. What happened last week was that Trump, aided by Scaramucci, found a way to escape from his orthodox Republican chapperones and go out on a joyride. They did manage to ditch Reince Priebus, but while John Kelly will no doubt prove a sterner nanny, his job of containing Trump will likely prove taxing. Meanwhile, it's not just Noonan among the party hacks who are sounding alarms about Trump; e.g., Charles Krauthammer: Longing for a self-contained, impenetrable Trump:

  Transparency, thy name is Trump, Donald Trump. No filter, no governor, no editor lies between his impulses and his public actions. He tweets, therefore he is.

  Ronald Reagan was so self-contained and impenetrable that his official biographer was practically driven mad trying to figure him out. Donald Trump is penetrable, hourly.

  Wrong metaphor. Trump and Reagan were similar in one respect: neither had anything coherent going on between their ears, just chaos and bestial desires. The difference was that Reagan was an actor (and more importantly, a paid corporate spokesman) who could credibly read the scripts he was given, whereas Trump just improvises (often making shit up)-- not because he's any good at it but because all his life he's been a boss surrounded by ego-stroking sycophants. Krauthammer, like many conservatives, is upset over Trump's taunting of Jeff Sessions, who's been hard at work implementing the conservative agenda to undermine democracy and rig the justice system while Trump's been throwing his juvenile tantrums.

  Given how rare it is for such committed Republican cronies as Noonan and Krauthammer to break ranks, their attacks on Trump may mark the end of the honeymoon. Orthodox Republicans may not have liked Trump back in the primary season, but they figured he'd be manageable once he got the nomination, and they were suddenly delighted with him once he did the one thing they most coveted: winning. And indeed he has proven pliable in terms of policy and personnel, abandoning every shred of independent thinking he displayed during the campaign. As long as he was helping them get what they wanted, they could tolerate his idiosyncrasies. But evidently something has changed: not just that he's proving ineffective and unpopular -- the health care debacle is really more their fault than it is Trump's -- but that he's becoming needlessly dangerous and self-destructive.

• Trita Parsi: The Mask Is Off: Trump Is Seeking War With Iran:

  President Donald Trump has made it clear, in no uncertain terms and with no effort to disguise his duplicity, that he will claim that Tehran is cheating on the nuclear deal by October -- the facts be damned. In short, the fix is in. Trump will refuse to accept that Iran is in compliance and thereby set the stage for a military confrontation. His advisers have even been kind enough to explain how they will go about this. Rarely has a sinister plan to destroy an arms control agreement and pave the way for war been so openly telegraphed.

  The unmasking of Trump's plans to sabotage the nuclear deal began two weeks ago when he reluctantly had to certify that Iran indeed was in compliance. Both the US intelligence as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed Tehran's fair play. But Trump threw a tantrum in the Oval Office and berated his national security team for not having found a way to claim Iran was cheating. According to Foreign Policy, the adults in the room -- Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster -- eventually calmed Trump down but only on the condition that they double down on finding a way for the president to blow up the deal by October.

• Matt Shuham: Trump Calls for 'Rough' Policing, Gives Blessing to Law Enforcement Abuses: Probably one of the ten scariest articles of the Trump era. Sure, there have been many instances where Trump looked to be endorsing ad-hoc violence against protesters, foreigners, other minorities -- why not suspected criminals? Well, because abuses eat at and eventually destroy the very notion that we live under a fair and equitable system of law and justice. And has become very clear over the past few years, what we have now is already way too permissive of police abuses. Indeed, quite a few police superintendents have come to recognize that bringing their forces under control is a major public relations concern. So what Trump is saying undermines responsible police as well as the entire system of justice, and helps to make American civil society coarser and more hateful.

  On the same speech: Dara Lind: Trump just delivered the most chilling speech of his presidency. In reaction, see: Cleve R Wootson Jr/Mark Berman: US police chiefs blast Trump for endorsing 'police brutality'.

• Matt Taibbi: The Anthony Scaramucci Era Will Be Freakish, Embarrassing and All Too Short:

  In the space of a week, Trump's new press expert demonstrated that he a) didn't know how to hold off-the-record conversations b) didn't understand that cameras and microphones keep rolling even when the red light is off and c) doesn't bother to check the other public statements made by administration officials before he makes statements of his own. An alien crashed on earth and given a two-minute tutorial on dealing with reporters would have done a better job. . . .

  The Communications Director job in the Trump administration is a no-win job, because the real Communications Director is Trump's Twitter feed. The job that Scaramucci technically occupies is a thankless and redundant position that involves standing before reporters and reconciling avalanches of already-circulated lies, contradictions, and insulting/ignorant statements.

  Even a genius of the highest order couldn't make this work. Of course, Trump hasn't had geniuses available to him. The fourth-rate minds he has instead had in his employ just started raging trash-fires whenever they tried to logically explain Trump's utterances.

  They gave us statements like Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts," or Katrina Pierson's bit about how Trump wasn't changing his position on immigration, but rather "changing the words that he is saying."

• Matthew Yglesias: The most important stories of the week, explained: The Senate rejected three versions of ACA repeal; Trump named a new Chief of Staff; Trump kind of banned transgender military service; Trump feuded with his attorney general.

• Reuters: US flies B-1B bombers over Korean peninsula after missile test: Not clear from the article whether they actually flew into North Korean air space, which would be daring the Koreans to shoot a plane down, dramatically escalating America's snit fit over North Korea's missile tests. Also: Tom Phillips: China and Russia have 'responsibility' for North Korea nuclear threat, says US. Reminds me that Casey Stengel once said that the secret to successful managing was keeping the guys who hate you (like North Korea) away from the ones on the fence (like Russia and China) -- a lesson Rex Tillerson never learned. The odds of Trump (or one of those generals he gives carte blanche to) doing something profoundly stupid over Korea have been steadily increasing -- much as it has with Iran (see Trita Parsi, above).

Daily Log

Streamnotes (July 2017)

Pick up text here.

Midweek Roundup

Accumulated all this in half a week, and no doubt missed lots along the way. Will catch up a bit on Sunday, but I don't see much free time between now and then, and the supply seems to be fucking endless. My fellow Americans: you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Scattered links:

• Dean Baker: Obamacare Isn't Just Dying, Trump and Republicans Are Trying to Kill It: Title could be phrased better. Although there is much room for improvement, Obamacare is only failing where political sabotage has kept it from being fully implemented (especially Medicaid expansion). Trump's predictions of failure depend mostly on his own administration's acts.

• Dean Baker/Arjun Jayadev/Joseph Stiglitz: Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Development: A Better Set of Approaches for the 21st Century: CEPR publication.

• Nina Burleigh: Alex Jones and Other Conservatives Call for Civil War Against Liberals.

• Chris Cillizza: The 29 most cringe-worthy lines from Donald Trump's hyper-political speech to the Boy Scouts.

• Esme Cribb: Scaramucci Vows to 'Kill All the F*cking Leakers' in Profanity-Laced Rant: And to think I was feeling uncomfortable watching Colbert doing his Italian mobster voices to paraphrase the new White House Communications Director, but once again satire gets gobsmacked by reality. Targets of the profanities include Steve Bannon and Reince Preibus as well as unnamed little people. For more, see Ryan Lizza: Anthony Scaramucci Called Me to Unload About White House Leakers, Reince Preibus, and Steve Bannon. Also: Amy Davidson Sorkin: When Anthony Scaramucci Fell in Love With Donald Trump:

  Perhaps Scaramucci admires Trump's knowledge of bankruptcy, perhaps especially moral bankruptcy, not as a degraded state but one in which some unprofitable principles can be written off and new, more marketable ones acquired. . . .

  Radical honesty doesn't seem like an option. Neither does actually useful information on the workings of the executive branch, or of Congress. When he was asked, on Friday, why he believed that the President would get "a win" on health care, he said, "The President has really good karma, O.K.? And the world turns back to him. He's genuinely a wonderful human being, and I think, as the members of Congress get to know him better and get comfortable with him, they're going to let him lead them to the right things for the American people. So, I think we're going to get the health care done."

• Lucia Graves: John McCain had the chance to do the right thing on healthcare. He failed. I don't particularly begrudge the bipartisan standing ovation McCain received on returning to the Senate following surgery and a diagnosis of brain cancer. It is, after all, a famously collegial institution, and nothing counters ideological prejudices like personal contact. However, his purpose in returning was to advance a partisan scheme to deprive millions of Americans of affordable and effective health insurance while treating the richest Americans with a sizable tax break. And while McCain said that he was opposed to the act he voted to advance, he proved his bad faith both then and in a later vote (see Tara Golshan: McCain said he wouldn't vote for the Senate health care bill. 6 hours later, he did. The fact is that McCain is one of the great con artists in American political history, something the media have fallen for repeatedly. If you need a refresher, see Alex Pareene's post from February 17: I Don't Want to Hear Another Fucking Word About John McCain Unless He Dies or Actually Does Something Useful for Once -- since then the odds of him dying vs. doing something useful have gone up, but even then the odds of the latter were vanishingly slim. The only "useful thing" I can recall him doing was to derail Boeing's original tanker lease scam, but Boeing eventually managed to get their tankers bought -- after at least one Boeing executive went to jail. McCain's career low point was probably his sabre-rattling against Russia over South Ossetia in 2008 (while he was running for president), but the fact is that he's long been the most dangerous hawk in the Senate. As for everything else, he's just an ordinary right-wing Republican hack. David Foster Wallace missed an opportunity when he reprinted his McCain essay as a separate book instead of folding it into his previous collection, Interviews With Hideous Men.

  Also, from Charles P Pierce: The Price of John McCain's Republican Loyalty:

  It was an ugly day in the United States Senate on Tuesday, as ugly a day as has been seen in that chamber since the death of Strom Thurmond, who used to make a day ugly simply by showing up. The Senate took up the Motion To Proceed on whatever the hell hash Mitch McConnell wants to make out of the American healthcare system. . . . But the ugliest thing to witness on a very ugly day in the United States Senate was what John McCain did to what was left of his legacy as a national figure. He flew all the way across the country, leaving his high-end government healthcare behind in Arizona, in order to cast the deciding vote to allow debate on whatever ghastly critter emerges from what has been an utterly undemocratic process. He flew all the way across the country in order to facilitate the process of denying to millions of Americans the kind of medical treatment that is keeping him alive, and to do so at the behest of a president who mocked McCain's undeniable military heroism.

  As the last line indicates, and the rest of the article elaborates, Pierce is one of many who previously succumbed to an exaggerated opinion of McCain's forthrightness or integrity or heroism -- there is plenty of reason to deny all three. Still, Pierce may be right about where this thing ends. It is, as ever, a case where an ounce of prevention (or at least forethought) could have prevented a whole world of hurt:

  The Republicans have the votes now. Dean Heller and Rob Portman and Shelley Moore Capito have lined up with their party once, and the likelihood is their respective prices will be met again because this is not a policy issue any more, it is pure politics now, a promise made by an extremist majority to its unthinking base. That's what the end of this ugly day looked like, a day on which the final bloody death of Barack Obama's legacy was placed on the fast track by people who know better, and on which Susan Collins of Maine was more of a maverick than John McCain ever was. It was an ugly day in the U.S. Senate, and there was nothing but ruin everywhere you looked.

  Also: Mehdi Hasan: Despite What the Press Says, "Maverick" McCain Has a Long and Distinguished Record of Horribleness. By the way, here's John McCain's Tracking Congress in the Age of Trump vote card. To be fair, he has wavered a bit since getting diagnosed with brain cancer.

• Ryan Grim: Steve Bannon Wants Facebook and Google Regulated Like Utilities: That actually makes a fair amount of sense, although I could come up with a better scheme based on non-profit public entities which would provide the same services without imposing ads on users. My favorite quote from the article:

  In 2011, Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, complained that Google had waited too long to hire an armada of lobbyists. . . . They have since caught up: In the first few months of the Trump administration, tech firms set new lobbying spending records in Washington.

  The latter probably became necessary because so many of them bet heavily on Hillary -- no need for lobbyists when you've already got the politicians in your pocket.

• Cameron Joseph: Dem's New Slogan Is Lame, but GOP Is Giving Them a Populist Opening: Slogan is "A Better Deal," introduced by Chuck Shumer in (where else?) a New York Times Op-Ed, followed up by a press event involving Shumer and Nancy Pelosi. Unclear from this piece how the whole thing came about, but it starts to suggest some thinking along the lines of Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract" -- a hint of serious ambitions from a crew that more often seems bent on self-sabotage. I don't mind the slogan, but the actual platform could use some sharpening (see Corey Robin below), and it wouldn't hurt to come up with some more credible leadership than Shumer and Pelosi. (From a NYT letter: "Can it be a better deal, with the same familiar dealers?")

  One comment on this is Lee Drutman: The Real Civil War in the Democratic Party. He points out that it was relatively easy to find an agenda that Shumer, Pelosi, and left-favorite Elizabeth Warren could agree on, but that rank-and-file Democrats are much more divided -- he says:

  Among the Democratic rank-and-file, the more consequential divide is between those willing to trust the existing establishment and those who want entirely new leadership. It's a divide that Democratic Party leaders ignore at their peril.

  He goes on to babble nonsense about "political institutions" and the "pragmatism" of the Democratic Party establishment, but the real crux of the issue is that the Clintons and Obama, Shumer and Pelosi, cannot be trusted to deliver on their campaign promises, and indeed don't seem to be bothered by their repeated failures. On the other hand, they're quite effective at delivering favors to the interests that finance them.

• Jamiles Lartey: 'I am livid': Donald Trump criticized for odd, disjointed speech to Boy Scouts.

• Charlie May: Judge: Kris Kobach, vice chair of Trump's voter fraud commission, has been "misleading the Court": Much notice has been paid recently to how Trump's treated Jeff Sessions, the first member of the Senate to endorse Trump. Less so about Trump's other early endorsers -- with Sessions they'd pass for the four horsemen of the apocalypse: Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, and Chris Christie -- none given positions in the new administration. But among lesser figures, take Kris Kobach, KS Secretary of State and the only elected Republican to endorse Trump before state caucuses here. Kobach famously showed up on Trump's doorstep with a binder of his brilliant ideas for running the country, but all he got was co-chair with Mike Pence on Trump's Election Integrity Commission, designed to play up Kobach's most scurrilous projects. That got him sued, in a case that he's repeatedly bumbled. And while he's also intent on running for governor of Kansas in 2018, Trump's appointment of Sam Brownback as pope of the State Department means Kobach will be running against an incumbent, Jeff Colyer. As the late Molly Ivins like to say, "lie down with dogs, get up with fleas" -- except with Trump it's worse, more like rats and bubonic plague (the fleas are just intermediary).

  By the way, the first clue about Trump was the nepotism. I should dig up Robert Townsend's quote on nepotism, but it's something like: if you practice nepotism, no first-rate people will ever work for you, because they'll know you're prejudiced against them, and you'll be stuck with your fucking worthless relatives.

  Also see, from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund: Sherrilyn Ifill: President Trump's Election Integrity Commission is illegal and unconstitutional -- that's why we filed a lawsuit.

• Alex Pareene: It's Not Mitch McConnell's Fault That Your Ideas Are Bad and Hated: Written before McConnell engineered his vote to open Senate discussion of his secret Trumpcare bill, so his impulse to pardon McConnell may have been premature.

  Perhaps it is related to the mental block that causes them to regularly forget that the only reason a Republican is currently president is because he constantly and loudly promised not to be a conservative on issues like social insurance. Instead of confronting the implications of that victory, conservatives instead have responded like Trump's own budget director, who regularly brags that he is tricking the president into exchanging his (popular) non-conservative ideas for (unpopular) conservative ones.

  This is why it's absurd to blame Mitch McConnell. The role of the Senate is to be the place where popular things go to die -- in the popular (albeit fictional) account of our Founders' intentions, it acts as the "cooling saucer," where a good thing everyone likes (hot tea) becomes something you dump down the drain (old, room temperature tea). The rules of the Senate were perfected over many decades to turn it into a place where the will of the people is easily frustrated. It is extraordinarily difficult to get large, popular bills through the Senate. Imagine, then, how hard it must be to pass incredibly unpopular bills.

  Well, maybe not so hard, because Pareene seriously underestimates the contempt that Republican politicians have for voters they've found so easy to manipulate, and the fear they have of movement conservatives itching to primary them.

• Heather Digby Parton: Trump's cynical jobs program: Dump your house, move somewhere else and work for less: "Maybe Trump supporters are glimpsing the truth: He has no plan to bring back high-paying jobs, and never did."

  The bottom line is that Trump doesn't care about American workers. His issue is with foreign competition for American companies, which isn't exactly the same thing. He said in a Republican primary debate, "We are a country that is being beaten on every front. Taxes too high, wages too high, we're not going to be able to compete against the world." His supporters had to pretend they didn't hear that: Their wages were too high.

• Charles P Pierce: Sam Brownback Is Your New Ambassador at Large for Religious Freedom: Remember The Peter Principle? It was a bestselling business book back in the 1970s that argued that people rise in organizations until they meet their level of incompetence, then they stay there. Brownback's appointment is evidence of an opposite corollary which rarely occurs in real life, but the only safety net Republicans believe in is one for their own failures, so the Trump administration sorted through all of their positions until they found the highest one where Brownback's incompetence will probably prove inconsequential. On the other hand, I suspect they've underestimated the Kansas governor, former senator, and almost instantly failed presidential aspirant. I mean, until now it's unlikely you've ever even heard that the US has an Ambassador at Large for Religious Freedom (the result of a 1998 law), so his acceptance has already made the US (and, let's face it, Trump) look more ridiculous. Brownback's chief qualification for this post is the fervor with which he's attempted to impose his own conservative Catholic religious beliefs on everyone else. But the cause of "religious freedom" has most often been invoked to defend bigotry and discrimination -- an interpretation that Brownback will be thrilled to adopt.

• Corey Robin: A Party That Wants to Die but Can't Pull the Plug: "The Democratic Party is offering tax giveaways for corporations. So much for learning from its mistakes." Probably unfair to write the Democrats off for this one gaffe, but worth pointing out that it is wrong in multiple ways: it subordinates workers to business instead of giving them skills (as education would) they can use to get better jobs wherever suits them best; it sends the wrong message to business -- namely that politicians are eager to bribe them to do things they should be doing anyway; and it doesn't give workers the leverage they need to convert their training into better paying jobs (as, e.g., helping them join unions would). One problem that Democrats like Chuck Shumer have is that they're so used to sucking up to business they don't have any other ideas.

• Marshall Steinbaum: Congressional Democrats Get Serious About Antitrust: Which would be a marked change from the Clinton and Obama administrations -- and, I agree, a necessary one:

  Antitrust must be a core component of any agenda that would address the slow economic growth, rising inequality, and wage stagnation that are our most pressing economic problems. At the root of all of these is the consolidation of corporate power. Corporate profits now account for over 15% of the economy's gross value-added, up from 5% in the early 1980s.

• Hiroko Tabuchi: Rooftop Solar Dims Under Pressure From Utility Lobbyists: Just in the last couple years it's started looking like renewable electrical sources will get the upper hand over coal and gas (and for that matter nuclear), primarily due to dramatic cost reductions in solar panels. However, utility companies don't like distributed solar, coal and gas companies don't like competition, nor do domestic producers of solar panels (the cheapest are made in Asia). A government concerned about climate change would lean against those pressures, but Trump is likely to respond favorably to such lobbying. Those who laughed when Trump promised to bring coal jobs back might reconsider.

• Matt Taibbi: Newly Released Documents Show Government Misled Public on Fannie/Freddie Takeover.

• Trevor Timm: If Trump wants to fire Jeff Sessions, let him -- it would be a gift to America. One of the week's more popular stories has been Trump's tweet attacks on his attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia investigation instead of doing the right thing and protecting the president and his family. Trump's too self-absorbed to care, but after Sessions lied about his own Russia meetings, recusal was literally the least he could do. Still, Timm is right: although there'd be little change in replacing most of Trump's appointees with anyone else likely to get Trump's approval, Sessions is one appointee with his own well-defined agenda, and he's working hard to leave a huge gash through all of our previous expectations of what justice in America means. Also see: Jon Swaine: Why did Donald Trump turn on attorney general Jeff Sessions?.

• Shaun Walker: Putin: Russia will retaliate if 'insolent' US lawmakers pass sanctions bill: Of course, American politicians think there's no risk in voting against Russia (not to mention Iran and North Korea), and maybe that's true as far as their own election prospects go. But they're making the world a more dangerous place.

Music Week

Music: Current count 28462 [28428] rated (+34), 364 [364] unrated (+0).

Very little new jazz in the queue, so I spent most of the week looking elsewhere -- including some old music by Taj Mahal and the late Larry Coryell following their latest albums. Seems like I'm increasingly diverging from Robert Christgau, although for once I like the Peter Perrett album more than he did (but Jay-Z less). He has yet to review my other A- records this week (Alison Krauss and Waxahatchee, though I'll be surprised if he doesn't like the latter). Only three records this week came from CDs.

On the Jazz Guides project, I managed to get 73% of the way through my Vocals 2000- file, bringing the 21st Century guide to 911 pages (vs. 746 for 20th Century). That's up 84 pages in one week. Some quick envelope math based on the remaining Jazz 2000- file suggests I'll wind up with about 1450 pages about three weeks into September. With some stragglers, probably best to nudge those figures out/up a bit: probably 750 + 1500 pages shortly after October 1. Assuming, of course, I keep at it reasonably hard, as I did last week.

I should publish Streamnotes on Friday or Saturday, before the usual Weekend Roundup and Music Week posts on Sunday and Monday (the last two days of July). Currently 121 records (94 new + 4 recent comps) in the draft file.

I filled out a ballot for the 82nd Annual DownBeat Readers Poll. So should you. Tried to spend as little time as possible here. Came up with this:

• Hall of Fame: George Russell
• Jazz Artist: Wadada Leo Smith
• Jazz Group: Mostly Other People Do the Killing
• Big Band: Satoko Fujii Orchestra
• Jazz Album (since 2016-06-01): Houston Person & Ron Carter, Chemistry (HighNote -16)
• Historical Album (since 2016-06-01): Don Cherry/John Tchicai/Irene Schweizer/Leonn Francioli/Pierre Favre, Musical Monsters (Intakt -16)
• Trumpet: Wadada Leo Smith
• Trombone: Steve Swell
• Soprano Saxophone: Jane Ira Bloom
• Alto Saxophone: François Carrier
• Tenor Saxophone: Houston Person
• Baritone Saxophone: Ken Vandermark
• Clarinet: Michael Moore
• Flute: Nicole Mitchell
• Piano: Matthew Shipp
• Keyboard: Craig Taborn
• Organ: Gary Versace
• Guitar: Mary Halvorson
• Bass: William Parker
• Electric Bass: Steve Swallow
• Violin: Jenny Scheinman
• Drums: Andrew Cyrille
• Vibraphone: Jason Adasiewicz
• Percussion: Hamid Drake
• Miscellaneous Instrument: Erik Friedlander (cello)
• Male Vocalist: Freddy Cole
• Female Vocalist: Catherine Russell
• Composer: Carla Bley
• Arranger: Steven Bernstein
• Record Label: Intakt
• Blues Artist or Group: Taj Mahal
• Blues Album (since 6/1/2016): David Bromberg Band, The Blues, the Whole Blues and Nothing but the Blues (Red House)
• Beyond Artist or Group: Parquet Courts
• Beyond Album (since 6/1/2016): A Tribe Called Quest, We Got It From Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service (Epic/Sony)

That took about an hour, as compared to the 8-10 hours I usually spend on the Critics Ballot. I did look at my 2017 crib sheet about midway through, which encouraged me to be more consistent. I had also looked at Tim Niland's ballot, although I only wound up agreeing on 5-6 picks (for one thing, unlike Tim I didn't do any write-ins). The one thing that took some extra time was that I copied down the Album of the Year nominees, checked my grades, and added things I wasn't aware of to my 2017 music tracking file. I found that I haven't heard 40 of the nominated new jazz albums (of 126, so 31.7%). My grade breakdown was A: 1, A-: 12, ***: 17, **: 25, *: 19, B: 6, B-: 6.

I also copied down the nominated "historical albums": I've heard 9/43 (20.9%), which is probably better than in recent years (although the new album share is probably worse). I didn't bother with blues albums -- indeed, my pick there wasn't even an A- record. "Beyond" is a concept I don't find meaningful, even trying to pictures it from the magazine's jazz/blues perspective.

Recommended links:

• Michael Hull: Why Didn't Macklemore Make 'The Story of O.J.'?
• Milo Miles: Carl Craig's String Theory: The Detroit House Pioneer Gets Orchestral
• The Guardian: The best albums of 2017 so far
• The Quietus: The Best Albums of 2017 Thus Far

New records rated this week:

• 21 Savage: Issa Album (2017, Slaughter Gang/Epic): [r]: B+(n*)
• Ryan Adams: Prisoner (2017, Blue Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Big Boi: Boomiverse (2017, Epic): [r]: B+(***)
• Benjamin Booker: Witness (2017, ATO): [r]: B+(***)
• Larry Coryell's 11th House: Seven Secrets (2016 [2017], Savoy Jazz): [r]: B+(*)
• Laszlo Gardony: Serious Play (Solo Piano) (2017, Sunnyside): [cd]: B+(*)
• Haim: Something to Tell You (2017, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Arve Henriksen: Towards Language (2016 [2017], Rune Grammofon): [r]: B
• J Hus: Common Sense (2017, Black Butter/Epic): [r]: B+(**)
• Jay-Z: 4:44 (2017, Roc Nation): [r]: B+(**)
• Jonwayne: Rap Album Two (2017, The Order Label): [r]: B+(***)
• Alison Krauss: Windy City (2017, Capitol): [r]: A-
• Brian Landrus Orchestra: Generations (2017, BlueLand): [cd]: B+(**)
• Nikki Lane: Highway Queen (2017, New West): [r]: B+(**)
• Carmen Lundy: Code Noir (2017, Afrasia Productions): [r]: B
• Taj Mahal & Keb' Mo': TajMo (2017, Concord): [r]: B
• Mura Masa: Mura Masa (2017, Polydor): [r]: B+(*)
• Spoek Mathambo: Mzansi Beat Code (2017, TEKA): [r]: B+(*)
• Ozomatli: Non-Stop: Mexico to Jamaica (2017, Cleopatra): [r]: B+(*)
• Peter Perrett: How the West Was Won (2017, Domino): [r]: A-
• Troy Roberts: Tales & Tones (2017, Inner Circle): [r]: B+(**)
• Mavis Staples: I'll Take You There: An All-Star Concert Celebration (2014 [2017], Blackbird Production Partners, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Dave Stryker: Strykin' Ahead (2016 [2017], Strikezone): [cd]: B+(*)
• Waxahatchee: Out in the Storm (2017, Merge): [r]: A-
• Wizkid: Sounds From the Other Side (2017, Starboy/RCA): [r]: B+(**)

Old music rated this week:

• Larry Coryell: Lady Coryell (1968 [1969], Vanguard): [r]: B
• Larry Coryell: Introducing the Eleventh House With Larry Coryell (1972 [1974], Vanguard): [r]: B+(*)
• Larry Coryell: The Restful Mind (1974 [1975], Vanguard): [r]: B+(***)
• Taj Mahal: Taj Mahal (1968, Columbia): [r]: B+(***)
• Taj Mahal: The Natch'l Blues (1968, Columbia): [r]: B+(***)
• Taj Mahal: Happy Just to Be Like I Am (1971, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Rising Sons: Rising Suns Featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder (1965-66 [1992], Columbia/Legacy): [r]: B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Paul Jones: Clean (Outside In Music): August 4
• Elan Pauer: Yamaha/Speed (Creative Sources)
• Oliver Schwerdt: Prestige/No Smoking (Euphorium, 2CD)
• Reggie Young: Forever Young (Whaling City Sound)

Weekend Roundup

I'm having a lot of trouble with websites making demands: that I pay them money, or sign up for things, or other demands I don't have the patience to parse. I understand that internet media businesses have a tough time making ends meet, and I'm not unsympathetic, but I'm not rich, and I'm not in the business of reporting on media, and I really hate where this is going: a world where information is locked up behind a handful of companies, where people have to decide something is worth paying for before they can find out whether it's worth anything at all. In such a world many people will only be able to read things that they value because they agree with, and most people will never read anything because the practical value of most information is vanishingly small. This is a hideous prospect promising a world that only grows more and more dysfunctional. Allowing paywalls to be bypassed by agreeing to look at tons of advertising only makes the information more untrustworthy and unappealing. Advertising may not be the root of all evil in America, but it's certainly contributed, especially by raising consumer manipulation to the level of a science.

I should probably compile a list of websites I'm boycotting -- or, effectively, that are boycotting me -- but I find the practice too annoying to obsess over. Looks like I should add the Washington Post to the list -- clicked on several pieces and all I get now are subscription screens. (The ad there started "I see you like great journalism" but the WP has rarely met that mark; e.g., see The Washington Post's War on Disability Programs Continues, and ask yourself: why should anyone pay these people money?) I'm especially annoyed at The Nation blocking me out, and have decided to stop linking to their articles. (We actually subscribe to the print edition of The Nation, which as I understand it entitles us to "full digital access" but I've never set that up before -- indeed, never had to.) I've started to avoid The New York Times and The New Yorker -- again, we pay them money for print editions, but they have "free article" counters, and I'd hate to waste my quota by looking at something stupid by David Brooks. We actually pay for quite a bit of print media, and my wife subscribes to digital things I don't even know about (and probably wouldn't be happy about if I did know). Still, we don't read so much or so widely because we find it entertaining or necessary for business. We do it because we're trying to be concerned, responsible citizens. And it sure looks like the goal of business in America is to make citizenship cost-prohibitive.

I'll add that I don't have paywalls, advertisements, or even any form of begware on my websites. I'm not paid for what I write, nor do I make any money off the occasional music discs I'm sent. I do this for free, and find that at least a few people find my analysis and information to be useful and worthwhile -- I guess that's my reward (that plus satisfaction in my craft). I even spend some money to make this possible, but I do feel the need to limit my losses. In this current media environment, that may mean limiting the sources I consult.

PS: Add Foreign Policy to that list, demanding about $90/year under the unsavory slogan, "Today, truth comes at a cost." The link I was following came from WarInContext: Trump assigns White House team to target Iran nuclear deal, sidelining State Department. This probably complements several links on Iran below.

Scattered links:

• Binta Baxter: How the Student Loan Industry Is Helping Trump Destroy American Democracy: Also, how Trump's helping the student loan industry.

• Cristina Cabrera: Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Have Raked in $212 Million Since 2016.

• Daniel José Camacho: Hillary Clinton is more unpopular than Donald Trump. Let that sink in: At least before the election, she polled better than Trump. You'd think she'd do even better after six months of Trump's non-stop scandals, but many recent polls show she'd still lose, and the Democrats have yet to register tangible gains by targeting Trump -- despite Trump's own favorability polling sinking into "worst ever" territory. Still, I'd take these polls with a grain of salt. Clinton's own favorability ratings have taken a hit partly because people who voted for her -- mostly people who would never have voted for Trump -- are still pissed at her for losing. As for the Democrats, they've yet to move on from her -- something that probably won't happen until the 2018 campaigns get seriously under way. Meanwhile, for all the scandal in Washington, there hasn't been a lot of evident everyday damage that most people can blame directly on Trump (immigrants are the exception here). Those things will compound over the next year -- something Democrats need to position themselves for.

• Jonathan Cohn: Only 32 House Democrats Voted Against Reauthorizing Trump's Deportation Machine: Note, however, 9 Republicans also voted no.

• Thomas Frank: The media's war on Trump is destined to fail. Why can't it see that? Wait, there's a "media war on Trump"? How can you tell? Didn't mainstream media gave Trump ten times as much coverage in 2016 as they did anyone else? The New York Times gave him an interview sandbox just last week. Sure, it made him look stupid, but doesn't that just play into his appeal? One might argue that Steven Colbert and Seth Myers are waging something like a war on Trump, but they're also catering to large niche market of people who can't stand Trump (and who have insomnia, possibly related). But mainstream media -- the so-called objective reporters -- are fatally compromised by corporate direction and an eye towards entertainment, and both of those factors have played into Trump while leaving the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party largely unexamined. One could imagine a responsible media going after Trump's administration, examining in depth the conflicts of interest, the money trails, the intense lobbying both of business fronts and other interests like the NRA and AIPAC -- and they needn't be partisan (all the better if they catch a few corrupt Democrats along the way). But that's not going to happen as long as the media is owned by a handful of humongous conglomerates. On the other hand, Trump's own war on the "fake news" media does seem to be working, if not to deter them from serious reporting, to reinforce the tendency of his believers to disregard anything critical they may come up with.

• Glenn Greenwald/Ryan Grim: US Lawmakers Seek to Criminally Outlaw Support for Boycott Campaign Against Israel:

  The Criminalization of political speech and activism against Israel has become one of the gravest threats to free speech in the West. In France, activists have been arrested and prosecuted for wearing T-shirts advocating a boycott of Israel. The U.K. has enacted a series of measures designed to outlaw such activism. In the U.S., governors compete with one another over who can implement the most extreme regulations to bar businesses from participating in any boycotts aimed even at Israeli settlements, which the world regards as illegal. On U.S. campuses, punishment of pro-Palestinian students for expressing criticisms of Israel is so commonplace that the Center for Constitutional Rights refers to it as "the Palestine Exception" to free speech.

  But now, a group of 43 senators -- 29 Republicans and 14 Democrats -- wants to implement a law that would make it a felony for Americans to support the international boycott against Israel, which was launched in protest of that country's decades-old occupation of Palestine. The two primary sponsors of the bill are Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland and Republican Rob Portman of Ohio. Perhaps the most shocking aspect is the punishment: Anyone guilty of violating the prohibitions will face a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison.

  Also see: Philip Weiss: Critics of US 'Israel Anti-Boycott Act' say even requests for information could expose citizens to penalties. For an example of a similar state bill, see Heike Schotten/Elsa Auerbach: National movement to silence BDS disguises itself in MA legislature as 'No Hate in Bay State' act.

  As this is happening, there are dozens of articles on the unfolding human catastrophe in Gaza; e.g. Gaza on Verge of Collapse as Israel Sends 2.2 Million People "Back to Middle Ages" in Electricity Crisis. There is also renewed violence in the West Bank; see: Jason Ditz: Six Killed, Hundreds Wounded as Violence Rages Across West Bank; Sheren Khalel: Three settlers stabbed to death and three Palestinians shot dead in turmoil over security measures at al-Aqsa mosque compound; also always useful to check out Kate's latest press compilation.

• Benjamin Hart: Obamacare and the Limits of Propaganda:

  But now, Republicans control every lever of the federal government, and any illusion that replacing Obamacare would be simple has been well and truly shattered. Instead, the relentless news coverage around health care has finally revealed Republicans' philosophy on the issue: nothing more than knee-jerk opposition to the previous president combined with an overwhelming desire to cut taxes for wealthy Americans.

  And by thus far rejecting any reasonable fixes to the law, the GOP has inadvertently helped drag the American public to the left. A recent Pew survey found that 60 percent of Americans now believe that government has a responsibility to ensure health care for its citizens, the highest number in a decade. That includes 52 percent of Republicans with family incomes below $30,000, up from 31 percent a year ago.

  Propaganda works best when the enemy it conjures is hazy and easily caricatured; it works less well when everyday reality intrudes. Americans have now gotten a taste of what citizens in other industrialized nations have long become accustomed to, and they don't want less of it. They want more.

• John Judis: The Conflict Tearing Apart British Politics: An Interview With David Goodhart: Judis' interviews have generally been interesting, but this one gets pretty stupid. Goodhart's distinction between Somewheres and Anywheres isn't ridiculous -- certainly they're more neutral terms than Provincials and Cosmopolitans, but that's pretty much what they boil down to. On the other hand, the way he maps British partisan politics onto his concepts is scattered and arbitrary, obviously intent primarily on marginalizing Jeremy Corbyn, who he clearly detests on all levels:

  Jeremy Corbyn probably represents the view of about five percent of the British people, but a lot of naïve people don't remember the 1970s and the 1980s and the thing called the Soviet Union. They live in this ahistorical world. Even older people who are not so naïve and realize that Jeremy Corbyn was not to their taste in almost every respect nonetheless planned to vote for him as a protest against Brexit on the assumption that he was not going to be prime minister. The things that pushed him up, gave him twelve points more than were expected, were the very high turnout of the blob youth left, the hard core Remainers, and enough of the blue collar voters coming back to Labour on anti-austerity grounds. . . .

  I think the traditional Labour coalition has blown apart, but on a one-off basis Jeremy Corbyn has managed to stitch it back together sufficiently to give him the uplift of ten percent in the vote. By going helter skelter for the educated or semi-educated youth vote and playing on the soft left ideology that so many kids come out of the university with, combined with this bribe to abolish student tuition fees, he is shoring up for his own political ends, the middle class welfare state. So he has this huge uplift of the student vote and enough of the blue-collar vote, but it's a one-off and I think Labour is still on the road to oblivion as a party.

  I don't know anything more about Goodhart -- e.g., I have no idea why he should be considered some sort of expert on UK politics -- but he seems like a prime example of neoliberalism, especially in his disdain for "the middle class welfare state" and his painting anything government might do to help out any but the poorest of citizens as a "bribe" -- and needless to say the poor who still do get some paltry dole will also face a substantial helping of shame. The left's counter to this is to establish a set of rights which raise everyone up.

  Goldhart's view of Labour as a declining, obsolescent political force seems to be stuck in the "end of history" fantasies prevalent in the US/UK after the collapse of Communism. Until the fall, the ruling capitalists in the West at least had a healthy fear of worker revolution, and therefore sought to make society and economy more palatable. After the collapse, they lost that fear, and went on a binge of greed that still hasn't subsided, even though they seemed to trip up severely with the 2008 meltdown. Meanwhile, the left tried to rethink and regroup. A recent, interesting piece on this is: Tim Barker: The Bleak Left. I haven't finished it, and have my own ideas which gradually formed as I was trying to write about post-capitalism in the late 1990s. One of the first things I did was to jettison Marx, reinterpreting his revolutionary impulses not as early-proletarian but as late-bourgeois. Paraphrasing Benjamin on Baudellaire, I saw him (and later Marxists) as "secret agents, of the bourgeoisie's discontent with its own rule." That brought me back to equality as the foundation seed both of liberal politics and any just society. No way to properly unpack this here, but given recent trends toward extreme inequality (thanks mostly to neoliberalism, although inherited money also has much to do with it, especially on the US right) it isn't at all surprising that the left would reform to countervail, and that it would draw both on liberal and on socialist traditions to do so.

• Sam Knight: Trump's Environmental Protection Pick Is BP's Former Lawyer -- and May Preside Over Cases Involving BP.

• Mike Konczal: "Neoliberalism" isn't an empty epithet. It's a real, powerful set of ideas. Centrist Democrats are getting touchy about being called "neoliberal" -- even in The Nation I've seen Danny Goldberg (link, if you can read it, here) insist that the left stop using the term. He doesn't offer an alternative, but the first one that pops into my mind is "corporate stooges" -- "neoliberal" at least suggests some degree of coherence and integrity. Konczal tries to sketch out how that ideology developed historically, going back to Charles Peters' 1983 "A Neoliberal's Manifesto." Since then, adherents have preferred to call themselves New Democrats (or New Labour in Britain), while British critics have tended to use neoliberal for macroeconomic policies that promoted free flow of capital and trade while forcing governments to adopt austerity, with no linkages to other issues (thus, for instance, one could be neoliberal on economic policy, neoconservative on war, and either liberal or conservative on social issues). However, at present neoliberalism is a cleavage line that splits Democrats -- even if Clinton had to compromise on trade and college tuition to secure the 2016 nomination. Indeed, neoliberal only became an epithet as it became clear that its promises of widespread prosperity turned out to be not just hollow but fraudulent.

• Richard Lardner: Lawmakers Announce Bipartisan Deal on Sweeping Russia Sanctions Bill: Proves two things: (1) nothing brings a nation together like a shared enemy, even a phony one; and (2) the Democrats have still not made a serious review of America's habit of imperial power projection, even though it objectively hurts both their base and their political message. A crude way to understand the latter point is that the only times Republicans join with Democrats is when they intuit that doing so hurts (and helps disillusion) the Democratic Party base. Democrats wouldn't have to go full isolationist to turn the corner on the neocon fetish with single-power projection that has dominated US policy since the mid-1990s. (The Iraq regime change vote marked their ascendancy, again keyed to take advantage of an enemy Democrats wouldn't doubt.) Democrats could, for instance, revert to their early beliefs in international law and institutions -- a belief that led to the UN, an organization the neocons have managed to totally marginalize (except when they can use it). That reminds me of a third point: this bill again testifies to the singular anomaly of US subservience to Israel. You'd think at the very least that Democrats would defend Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, but their allegiance to Israel trumps party loyalty.

  One should note that while Congress is limiting Trump's power to reduce international tensions by curtailing sanctions, that same body is evidently giving Trump a free hand to start any war that strikes his fancy. See (if you can): John Nichols: Paul Ryan Hands Donald Trump a Blank Check for Endless War.

• Dylan Matthews: President Trump's essentially unlimited pardon power, explained: Reports are that Trump has already started discussing using his pardon powers to obstruct the Russia investigation. Can he do that? Yes. Would that be grounds for impeachment? Probably. Will the Republican congress act on that? Nope. Also, where early reports merely stated that Trump was asking about his pardon powers, now he seems to have gotten the answer he wants: Cristina Cabrera: Trump Asserts His 'Complete Power' to Pardon. On the other hand, Laurence Tribe argues No, Trump can't pardon himself. The Constitution tells us so.

• Caitlin MacNeal: Spicey's Greatest Hits: Trump spokesman Sean Spicer resigned this week, after Anthony Scaramucci was appointed as White House Communications Director. Link has videos of some of Spicer's more famous gaffes, but his root problem was the material he had to work with, and the so-called journalists who cover the presidency and can't seem to dig deeper than press briefings and Trump's twitter feed. Scaramucci is a hedge fund guy, which makes you wonder what he's doing slumming in the White House staff. His first job, of course, was to clean up his own twitter history: Cristina Cabrera: Scaramucci on Twitter Deletion Spree.

• Tom McKay: Trump Nominates Sam Clovis, a Dude Who Is Not a Scientist, to be Department of Agriculture's Top Scientist: But he did work as host of a right-wing talk show back in Iowa.

• Heather Digby Parton: Trump rejects his poll numbers as fake news -- but even his voters are starting to notice the scam.

• John Quiggin: Can we get to 350ppm? Yes we can: A relatively optimistic forecast on climate change, based largely on recent technological trends like much cheaper solar power, but noting various risks, and assuming "the absence of political disasters such as a long-running Trump presidency." Links to a contrasting, downright apocalyptic view, not specifically linked to Trump: David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth.

• Lisa Rein: Interior Dept. ordered Glacier park chief, other climate expert pulled from Zuckerberg tour

• Sam Sacks: Trump Kicks Off Voter Fraud Commission With Innuendo That States Are Hiding Something. Kris Kobach's voter suppression racket is one of the most disgusting of Trump's programs. Still, it's rather a shock to see Trump so personally involved with it.

• Matt Taibbi: What Does Russiagate Look Like to Russians? Kind of like Americans are war-crazed fanatics whose hatred of Russia is less ideological than genetic?

  For journalists like me who have backgrounds either working or living in Russia, the new Red Scare has been an ongoing freakout. A lot of veteran Russia reporters who may have disagreed with each other over other issues in the past now find themselves in like-minded bewilderment over the increasingly aggressive rhetoric.

  Many of us were early Putin critics who now find ourselves in the awkward position of having to try to argue Americans off the ledge, or at least off the path to war, when it comes to dealing with the Putin regime.

  There's a lot of history that's being glossed over in the rush to restore Russia to an archenemy role.

  For one, long before the DNC hack, we meddled in their elections. This was especially annoying to Russians because we were ostensibly teaching them the virtues of democracy at the time.

  The case in point was Boris Yeltsin's 1966 campaign, where "three American advisers [were] sent to help the pickling autocrat Yeltsin devise campaign strategy." Yeltsin then created the corrupt oligarchy we like to blame on Putin.

  Evidently, one of the rarest skills in the world is the ability to imagine how other people view us.

• Trevor Timm: ICE agents are getting out of control. And they are only getting worse: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (not sure why the article refers to them as "Ice" rather than "ICE"). They've had the legal authority, for some time, so all Trump had to do to crank them up was "take the shackles off" ("eerily echoing the CIA's comments post-9/11 that they would 'take the gloves off' in response to the terrorist attack"). Of course, Trump is doing more: "stripping away due process protections for arrested immigrants via executive order, the US justice department has even attempted to cut off legal representation for some immigrants."

• Robin Wright: Is the Nuclear Deal With Iran Slipping Away? Also on Iran: Trita Parsi: War with Iran is back on the table -- thanks to Trump. By the way, Parsi, who wrote the definitive book on why Israel decided to pump Iran up as "an existential threat" (Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States) has a new book Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy.

• Matthew Yglesias: The most important stories of the week, explained: the Obamacare repeal push died, then came back; John McCain has brain cancer; Donald Trump said some things; House Republicans released a budget plan. Other Yglesias pieces: Trump's new communications director used to call him an anti-American hack politician (not any more: see Cristina Cabrera: Scaramucci on Twitter Deletion Spree); Trumpcare still isn't dead; A new interview reveals Trump's ignorance to be surprisingly wide-ranging; The latest Trump interview once again reveals total disregard for the rule of law; Trump is mad Democrats didn't work with him on health care, but he never tried. Also, here's a Yglesias tweet:

  Look, just because Sessions hasn't actually been convicted of a crime is no reason we can't start seizing his property now.

Music Week

Music: Current count 28428 [28390] rated (+38), 364 [361] unrated (+3).

Sad to note that Joe Fields, still active at 88, died last week. Since the 1960s, when he started out with Prestige Records, he has been responsible for an extraordinary number of great mainstream jazz records. He founded a series of labels -- Cobblestone, Muse, Onyx, High Note, and Savant, running the latter two with his son Barney since 1996. Along the way he cultivated many artist careers -- perhaps most notably, Houston Person started with him at Prestige and followed him through Muse and High Note. If Fields had a signature, it was picking up artists discarded from major labels and giving them second (or third) careers.

Pending queue only has six albums in it, including the four that arrived last week. I only reviewed three records from CD last week (two came up A- after I played them a dozen or more times -- the other A- got three spins on Napster). Still, a pretty high rated count, so not much else got that kind of attention -- and the six EPs went especially fast.

As promised, I got into the download queue last week: 10 albums, mostly from ECM, none as good as Craig Taborn's Daylight Ghosts last week. I probably have another dozen saved up, and could dig up more if I went through my mail (although some may have expired). A few of the items below came from mid-year lists by Phil Overeem and Matt Rice (linked to last week). Others came from thumbing through the August DownBeat.

The latter has their 65th Annual Critics Poll results, which I voted in and annotated my ballot back in April. Especially pleased to see Don Cherry and Herbie Nichols added to their Hall of Fame (along with George Gershwin and Eubie Blake -- no complaints there either; the latter three came from their Veterans Committee). The category winners -- minus a few I care less about; RS = Rising Star; in parens: first number is my 1-2-3 pick (if winner on my ballot), otherwise my pick and finish (if on list); ergo: (1) means my pick won:

• Trumpet: Wadada Leo Smith (1); RS: Taylor Ho Bynum (1).
• Trombone: Steve Turre (8 Roswell Rudd); RS: Marshall Gilkes (9 Joe Fiedler).
• Soprano Saxophone: Jane Ira Bloom (8 Sam Newsome); RS: Christine Jensen (16 Mike Ellis).
• Alto Saxophone: Rudresh Mahanthappa (François Carrier); RS: Matana Roberts (13 Dave Rempis).
• Tenor Saxophone: Charles Lloyd (14 David Murray); RS: Noah Preminger (5 Ellery Eskelin).
• Baritone Saxophone: Gary Smulyan (4 Hamiet Bluiett); RS: Dave Rempis (5 Gebhard Ullmann).
• Clarinet: Anat Cohen (5 Ben Goldberg); RS: Oscar Noriega (19 Avram Fefer).
• Piano: Kenny Barron (Irène Schweizer); RS: Kris Davis (1).
• Guitar: Mary Halvorson (2; 8 Marc Ribot); RS: Gilad Hekselman (Samo Salamon).
• Bass: Christian McBride (6 William Parker); RS: Eric Revis (7 Ingebrigt Håker Flaten).
• Violin: Regina Carter (8 Jason Kao Hwang); RS: Sara Caswell (10 Szilard Mezei).
• Drums: Jack De Johnette (Gerry Hemingway); RS: Jeff Ballard (20 Paal Nilssen-Love).

Looking back, several of my picks were just whims. I probably should have voted for Bloom over Newsome, and I can't fault De Johnette (cf. this week's record -- drumming is amazing there, something I can't imagine anyone else matching) or Revis, or begrudging any recognition of Barron. Rempis started on alto, but I think his tenor sax is his main instrument now -- still, I don't think of him on baritone at all, so that came as a surprise. Two of my picks were write-ins (Schweizer and Salamon -- both serious ballot omissions), so of course they didn't finish. Smith and Halvorson also won other categories, so they were featured in articles.

Preminger was well down my list at tenor sax (a long list), but he's put together a fine series of relatively mainstream albums (two A-, one ***, two **), so I shouldn't be surprised that he's getting some recognition. I also credit Mahanthappa with six A- (or in one case A) albums, so he's a pretty reasonable pick (albeit in a real competitive category: Carrier has 10 A- records, Anthony Braxton 19, Steve Lehman 5 + 3 in Fieldwork + 1 with Mahanthappa [the A], not that I counted before voting).

Continuing to make progress on compiling my jazz reviews into two guides: a haphazard retro-survey of the 20th century, and a somewhat more systematic guide to post-2000 (21st century) jazz. I started by collecting the reviews from their various column sources into a huge text file. Since then I've been scanning through my database files, adding dates and instruments where I had them, pulling out whatever reviews I had, and adding any other rated but unreviewed records. It took many weeks to work through Jazz '80s-'90s (1516 artists). Since then, I picked up three much shorter files: Latin Jazz (147), Pop Jazz (249), and Avant-Garde (156).

The pop jazz list was rather depressing, as it is far from comprehensive: in fact, mostly concentrated in the early Jazz CG days (2004-06) after which it became clear that I wasn't likely to review those records favorably. It would probably be easier to cut them out than it would be to cover them anywhere near as comprehensively as I cover mainstream and avant jazz. One saving grace was that it lowered the grade curve, although probably not significantly.

The "avant-garde" list was more interesting, but again is far from comprehensive. The definition I tended to follow was AMG's genre classification, which itself stradled minimalism, experimental rock, and modern (or, a term I prefer, post-classical) composition, but only rarely avant-jazz. I tried to take an interest in such music back in the 1970s, so one thing I noticed was that several dozen LPs I vaguely recall never got into the database (e.g., I probably had five or so albums by Karlheinz Stockhausen, but none were listed). On the other hand, the "shopping list" included quite a few albums from Kyle Gann's 1998-99 Consumer Guides -- most by people I hadn't heard of otherwise.

The compilation files are now up to 746 pages (20th century, 288k words) and 827 pages (21st century, 403k words). There are a few odds and ends that I've been including but were tucked away in odd database files (e.g., Astor Piazzolla in "latin," John Fahey in "folk"), but basically the 20th century compilation is about as large as it's going to get. Page sizes are different, but that probably makes it about 25% of the size of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings -- a human impossibility to match. On the other hand, the 21st century book will continue to grow, perhaps considerably. The Jazz (2000-) file will add 2248 artists, and Vocals (2000-) has another 484 artists.

Back in April I estimated that I might have the compilation done sometime from August to October. Looks like the most I can do in a day is about 150 artists, so I'm looking at another 20 days actual work time -- for various reasons I've had trouble spending more than 4 days/week on this, so let's figure another 5 weeks. Labor Day? Maybe. Not sure what happens then, but I'll try to convert it to some distributable format. Still needs a massive amount of editing to be publishable. Don't know when/if that will ever happen.

New records rated this week:

• John Abercrombie Quartet: Up and Coming (2016 [2017], ECM): [dl]: B+(*)
• Sebastien Ammann: Color Wheel (2015 [2017], Skirl): [cd]: A-
• Theo Bleckmann: Elegy (2016 [2017], ECM): [dl]: B+(*)
• Jaimie Branch: Fly or Die (2017, International Anthem): [r]: B+(**)
• Charly Bliss: Guppy (2017, Barsuk): [r]: B+(**)
• Avishai Cohen: Cross My Palm With Silver (2016 [2017], ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Jack DeJohnette/Larry Grenadier/John Meddeski/John Scofield: Hudson (2017, Motéma): [r]: A-
• Bill Frisell/Thomas Morgan: Small Town (2016 [2017], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Golden Pelicans: S/T (2014, Total Punk, EP): [r]: B+(***)
• Golden Pelicans: Oldest Ride Longest Line (2015, Total Punk, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Golden Pelicans: Disciples of Blood (2017, Goner, EP): [r]: B+(***)
• Giovanni Guidi: Ida Lupino (2015 [2016], ECM): [dl]: B+(*)
• Benedikt Jahnel Trio: The Invariant (2016 [2017], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Sean Jones: Live From Jazz at the Bistro (2017, Mack Avenue): [r]: B+(*)
• Aaron Parks/Ben Street/Billy Hart: Find the Way (2015 [2017], ECM): [dl]: B+(*)
• Nicki Parrott: Dear Blossom: A Tribute to Blossom Dearie (2017, Arbors): [r]: B+(*)
• Nicki Parrott: Unforgettable: The Nat King Cole Songbook (2016 [2017], Venus): [r]: B+(**)
• Chris Potter: The Dreamer Is the Dream (2016 [2017], ECM): [dl]: B+(*)
• Karriem Riggins: Headnod Suite (2017, Stones Throw): [r]: B+(**)
• Louis Sclavis: Asian Fields Variations (2016 [2017], ECM): [dl]: B+(*)
• Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: Ruler Rebel (2017, Stretch Music/Ropeadope): [r]: B+(**)
• Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: Diaspora (2017, Stretch Music/Ropeadope): [r]: B+(**)
• Sex Mob: Cultural Capital (2016, Rex): [r]: B+(**)
• ShitKid: ShitKid (2016, PNKSLM, EP): [bc]: B-
• ShitKid: EP 2 (2017, PNKSLM, EP): [bc]: B
• ShitKid: Fish (2017, PNKSLM): [bc]: B+(*)
• Rotem Sivan: Antidote (2017, Alma): [r]: B+(**)
• Bria Skonberg: With a Twist (2017, Okeh): [r]: B+(*)
• Tomasz Stanko New York Quartet: December Avenue (2016 [2017], ECM): [dl]: B+(**)
• Katie Thiroux: Off Beat (2016 [2017], Capri): [cd]: A-
• Florian Wittenberg: Don't Push the Piano Around (2017, NurNichtNur): [cd]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Miracle Steps: Music From the Fourth World 1983-2017 (1983-2017 [2017], Optimo): [bc]: B+(***)
• Allen Ravenstine + Albert Dennis: >Terminal Drive (1975 [2017], Smog Veil, EP): [dl]: B

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Satoko Fujii/Natsuki Tamura: Kisaragi (Libra)
• Hal Galper and the Youngbloods: Live at the Cota Jazz Festival (Origin)
• Laszlo Gardony: Serious Play (Solo Piano) (Sunnyside)
• Brian Landrus Orchestra: Generations (BlueLand): July 28

Weekend Roundup

Might as well go back to my original title, since this week I have more comments (albeit fewer than usual links), and "Week Links" never was a very good title. Browser limits are still keeping me from seeing as much as I used to, but now that I've figured out how to work around a couple serious bugs in Chromium I'm getting more done. Mostly rounded these up on Saturday -- good thing since I chewed up most of Sunday cooking a small dinner-for-two (a cut-back version of jambalaya) and doing some tree trimming (much too hot here to do that).

Getting very close to the end of Bernie Sanders' Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. First half is a campaign journal where it turns out he was as delighted meeting us as we were finding him. Second is a policy manual which doesn't venture as far as I would but strikes me as a well-reasoned merger of the viable and the practical. I really don't get people who see him as too idealistic, or as too compromised. One thing that's missing is any real treatment of foreign policy. Some ambitious Democrat needs to stake out a radical shift there, returning to the belief in international law that Wilson and Roosevelt advocated, while paring back America's penchant for military and/or clandestine intervention. But while he touches most other bases, I do believe that Bernie is correct that inequality is the central political issue of our times, and the more we do on that, the better most other things will become.

Scattered links:

• Dean Baker: Obamacare is only 'exploding' in red states: Most of the problems with ACA private insurance exchanges are concentrated in states with Republican governors/legislatures, who were also culpable for failing to expand Medicaid, leaving millions of poorer Americans without health care insurance. "Where Republican governors have sought to sabotage the program, they have largely succeeded. Where Democratic governors have tried to make the ACA work, they too have largely succeeded." That Trump thinks ACA is a disaster says more about the bubble he gets his information from.

• Dean Baker: How Rich Would Bill Gates Be Without His Copyright on Windows? Gates' personal fortune is estimated at $70 billion, and the copyright is at the root of that, followed by various patents and business practices that led to Microsoft's conviction for violating antitrust laws -- the last major antitrust case any administration in Washington bothered to prosecute. As so-called intellectual property goes, copyright is a minor problem, as long as we're talking about works of art -- the latest extended terms are way too long, and we would be better off with a program to buy up older copyrights and move work into the public domain. Copyright of software code has rarely proved a problem: what killed Novell's efforts to produce a compatible DOS wasn't copyright: Microsoft's illegal/predatory business practices protected their monopoly. The real alternative is free software, which has been very successful even without public funding -- fairly modest investments there would pay huge dividends to the public. Baker also talks about patents, which are a much more daunting problem, even beyond their obvious costs. ("The clearest case is prescription drugs where we will spend over $440 billion this year for drugs that would likely sell for less than $80 billion in a free market.") Patents allow owners to stake out broad claims and sue others for infringement even when the latter developed innovations completely independently. Patents made more sense when they protected capital investments for manufacturing, but that's never the case for software patents -- they exist purely to line corporate pockets by harassing potential competition (including from free software).

• Cristina Cabrera: Poll: Majority of Republicans Now Say Colleges Are Bad for America: The poll question is are colleges and universities having a "negative effect on the way things are going in the country." In 2015, 37% of Republicans thought that; today 58%. Before 2015, the Republican figures were relatively stable (56% favorable in 2010, 54% in 2015), and Democrats have become slightly more favorable, 65% in 2010, 72% today. The shift in Republican views coincided with the realization that the Republican presidential primaries would turn into contests between dumb and dumber, where candidates competed to show how little they understood the modern world and how everything worked (or, increasingly often, didn't work). As I recall, the first to stake out an anti-college position was Rick Santorum, and at the time I found his position shocking. For starters, it ignores the fact that we completely depend on science and advanced technology for nearly every aspect of our way of life -- what happens to us when we stop educating smart people to develop and maintain that technology? Nor is it just technology: the right's prejudices have a tough time surviving any form of open debate -- which is why conservatives have increasingly retreated into their own private institutions. Still, this is anomalous: colleges have always been institutions of, by, and for the elites, dominated by old money while occasionally opening the doors to exceptionally talented outsiders -- especially ones eager to join the system (Clinton and Obama are obvious examples, ones that have left an especially bitter taste for Republicans). And while the post-WWII expansion opened those doors wider for middle class Americans, if anything the trend has reversed lately, as prohibitive pricing is making college more elitist again. Still, this shows an increasingly common form of disconnect between Republican elites and masses: the latter are driven mostly by pushing their hot buttons, and all they have to do is get people so worked up they won't realize the incoherency of anti-elite and anti-diversity positions, or the fact that the rich still have their legacy privileges, so will be the last to be deprived of higher education's blessings.

• Jason Ditz: House Approves $696 Billion Military Spending Bill: Includes $75 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations, which is subject to change if Trump approves more "surges." Of all Trump's budget changes, more Defense spending struck me as the easiest to pass, because the War Lobby extends beyond Republicans and well into the Democratic Party. More Ditz pieces: House NDAA Amendments Would Limit US Participation in Yemen War; Trump Wants Authority to Build New Bases in Iraq, Syria.

• Dahlia Lithwick: Trump's election commission has been a disaster. It's going exactly as planned.

  As Kobach put it to Ari Berman last month, his whole master plan for world dominion was so simple: to create in Kansas -- where he is running for governor and has been secretary of state for a number of years -- a template for programmatic vote suppression nationwide. If he created "the absolute best legal framework," other states and the federal government would follow. Somehow, though, Trump's "election integrity" commission turned into one of the most colossal cockups in an administration already overflowing with them.

• Marc Lynch: Three big lessons of the Qatar crisis.

• Reza Marashi/Tyler Cullis: Trump Is Violating the Iran Deal

• Josh Marshall: A Theory of the Case [07-08]:

  During the election I frequently referenced one of my favorite quotes and insights from the insight, which came from Slate's Will Saletan: "The GOP is a failed state. Donald Trump is its warlord." To me this clever turn of phrase captures at a quite deep level why Trump was able to take over the GOP. The key though is that once Trump secured the Republican nomination, once he became the Republican and Hillary Clinton the Democrat, all the forces of asymmetric partisan polarization kicked into place and ensured that essentially all self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents fell into line and supported Trump. . . .

  Trump embodies what I've come to think of as a "dominationist" politics which profoundly resonates with the base of the GOP and has an expanding resonance across the party. Party leaders made the judgment that since they couldn't defeat Trump they should join him, hoping he would deliver on a policy agenda favoring money and using public policy to center risk on individuals. That hope has been entirely confirmed.

• Jack O'Donnell: Trump put family first when I worked for him. It was disastrous.

• Julianne Schultz: The world we have bequeathed to our children feels darker than the one I knew

• Tim Shorrock: Kushner and Bannon Team Up to Privatize the War in Afghanistan: Also Erik Prince and Stephen Feinberg, who stand to make most of the money in the deal.

• Tierney Sneed: Insurers Torch New Cruz Provision in TrumpCare: 'Simply Unworkable': The Cruz amendment that was supposed to save McConnell's Obamacare repeal/replace bill would allow insurance companies to offer lower-priced plans that don't meet minimal federal guidelines for health insurance. Of course, what makes such plans cheaper is that they don't adequately insure the people who buy them.

• Timothy Snyder: Trump is ushering in a dark new conservatism: A historian stuck in Eastern Europe's "Bloodlands" between Hitler and Stalin tries to drive a wedge between conservatives and Trump:

  In his committed mendacity, his nostalgia for the 1930s, and his acceptance of support from a foreign enemy of the United States, a Republican president has closed the door on conservatism and opened the way to a darker form of politics: a new right to replace an old one.

  Conservatives were skeptical guardians of truth. . . .

  The contest between conservatives and the radical right has a history that is worth remembering. Conservatives qualified the Enlightenment of the 18th century by characterizing traditions as the deepest kind of fact. Fascists, by contrast, renounced the Enlightenment and offered willful fictions as the basis for a new form of politics. The mendacity-industrial complex of the Trump administration makes conservatism impossible, and opens the floodgates to the sort of drastic change that conservatives opposed.

  Pace Snyder, I'm not inclined to equate Trump with Hitler, but I'm also unwilling to credit "conservatives" with the moral or intellectual conscience or coherence to oppose either. The one constant in the whole history of conservatism is the belief that some people should rule over others, and more often than not they're willing to discard any principles they may previously have found convenient to accomplish their goal. You see that in how willingly pretty much the whole right, and not just in Germany and Italy, admired Hitler and Mussolini. Trump, too, captured the right by offering the one thing it most wished for: victory. But there is a difference: Hitler had his own agenda, one rooted in the smoldering resentments of the Great War and the collapse of Germany's Empire. Trump's notion of America the Great may not be much different, but his ideas and plans are strictly derivative, a parroted, almost cartoonish distillation of recent conservative propaganda -- a bundle of clichés and incoherent rage, selected purely because that's what seems to work. No doubt some Trump supporters, especially among the "alt-right" white nationalists, can dress this up darkly. One thing we can be sure of is that we won't be saved by conservatives.

• Jeff Stein: The Kodiak Kickback: the quiet payoff for an Alaska senator in the Senate health bill: Looks like the fix is in for "moderate" Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski:

  Buried in Senate Republicans' new health care bill is a provision to throw about $1 billion at states where premiums run 75 percent higher than the national average.

  Curiously, there's just one state that meets this seemingly arbitrary designation: Alaska. . . .

  Republicans' health care bill will cost Alaska Medicaid recipients about $3 billion. In exchange, they're trying to buy off Murkowski with far less in funding for the Obamacare exchanges. We'll know soon if it worked.

• Jonathan Swan: Scoop: Bannon pushes tax hike for wealthy: Technically, Bannon fills the same role as Karl Rove, but I've never seen anyone refer to him as "Trump's Brain," even though Trump clearly needs one. Rove was a political strategist in the conventional sense, a role that became more prominent under Bush than under Clinton or Obama because it was clearer that Bush needed one. So does Trump, but whereas Rove had a pretty good sense of public opinion even if only to manipulate it, Bannon seems to pull his ideas straight out of his arse. Besides, Trump's subcontracted every policy issue to his straight conservative fellow travelers, leaving Bannon isolated. So that Bannon wants something doesn't clearly mean a thing. Still, higher taxes on the superrich would be a popular (and for that matter populist) move, but don't stand a chance in a Republican Congress almost exclusively dedicated to the opposite. Besides, as this piece makes clear, Trump has others -- Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin are prominent names here -- pulling in the other direction. Biggest non-surprise in the article: "They're becoming far less wedded to revenue neutrality."

• Matt Taibbi: Russiagate and the Magnitsky Affair, Linked Again: Much interesting background on the Magnitsky thing, which goes a long way to explaining why Putin remains so suspicious and ominous even if you reject the neocons' "new cold war" aspirations. I personally think the Trump Jr. meeting/emails are "no big deal" but also suspect that the Trumps would love to get in on Putin's corruption scams.

• Jonathan Taplin: Can the Tech Giants Be Stopped? WSJ story, but you can read more of it in the link I provided. E.g.:

  The precipitous decline in revenue for content creators has nothing to do with changing consumer preferences for their content. People are not reading less news, listening to less music, reading fewer books or watching fewer movies and TV shows. The massive growth in revenue for the digital monopolies has resulted in the massive loss of revenue for the creators of content. The two are inextricably linked.

  The numbers cited for internet ad revenue are much larger than I expected, and seem to be almost exclusively concentrated in a handful of companies. Meanwhile, we need a new and different model, both for content creation and for internet services. What we have now is little more than a siphon for draining our money and concentrating it in the hands of a few vultures. I suppose WSJ thinks they're fighting this with their paywall, but they're just adding to the problem.

• Kenneth P Vogel/Rachel Shorey: Trump's Re-Election Campaign Doubles Its spending on Legal Fees: So does this mean the campaign is at this stage mostly a slush fund to defray Trump's legal costs? Too bad Clinton couldn't run in 2000 when he needed something like to handle that sordid impeachment affair. As it was, he had to go bankrupt, then recoup his losses making post-presidential speeches.

• Melissa Batchelor Warnke: Democrats are doubling down on the same vanilla centrism that helped give us President Trump.

• Matthew Yglesias: The most important stories of the week, explained: Senate Republicans released a new health bill; Donald Trump Jr. has a problem; Christopher Wray is set to be the next FBI director; the CBO scored Trump's budget. Yglesias previously covered the same stories in greater depth: The revised health bill cuts taxes less without doing anything to boost coverage; I don't believe Donald Trump Jr., and neither should you; and CBO: Trump plan won't balance the budget even with his fake revenue-neutral tax reform.

• Poddy looks into the Kristol Ball of Counterfactuals [No More Mister Nice Blog]: Attempts to counter an op-ed from John Podhoretz (link in article) called "Hillary's White House would be no different from Trump's," which argues:

  Trump hasn't done anything in office, other than nominating a Supreme Court justice and sending a raid to Syria, and Clinton wouldn't have been able to do anything either, with both Houses of Congress run by Republicans. Of course she would be more boring than Trump, since she is evil but not a sower of chaos, but we wouldn't know what we were missing. The Clinton family melodrama would resemble that of the Trumps in its ethical compromises, with Clinton Foundation donors hovering around the White House, which is identical to President Trump spending every weekend hovering around the golfers and hotel guests filling his personal coffers.

  Podhoretz has one valid point here: that Clinton was going to have a hard time separating herself and her administration from the taint of corruption surrounding the Clinton Foundation. Nor can we really credit much her promises to do so, given how Trump has found it impossible to fulfill his own promises to isolate himself from his business interests. Even so, with Clinton the thicket of corruption complaints would be mostly laughable, blown up by the hysterical "right-wing noise machine," whereas Trump's numerous conflicts of interest alrealdy seem to try the patience of mainstream journalists who'd rather play "gotcha" with Russia. As for everything else, what Trump has actually managed to do -- even discounting things that Clinton might also have done, like escalating the wars in Syria and Afghanistan -- has actually been pretty astonishing. Trump has signed dozens of executive orders reversing hard-won gains from Obama. He's signalled that the US government won't be enforcing its civil rights laws anymore. He's reversed some key openness protections for the Internet. He's launched a monstrous commission on "voting fraud" that's already having the effect of reducing voter registration. He's raising money for a "re-election campaign" four years off, and using that money to pay his legal bills. His Supreme Court pick is already paying dividends for the extreme right. He may not have a lot of legislative accomplishments yet, but he's perilously close on a measure to repeal Obamacare that will cost more than 20 million Americans their health insurance, while making health care more expensive and less accessible for pretty much everyone. That measure would be a tax bonanza for the very rich, and Republicans are working on more of those.

  The article also posits that a Clinton win would also have tipped the Senate to the Democrats. Perhaps, but I'd shift the focus a bit: a Democratic win in the Senate (and even more so one in the House) would have tipped the presidential election to Clinton. Perhaps she should have run on that, instead of trying to appeal to suposedly moderate suburban Republicans to split their ballots and let Clinton save us from that ogre Trump. Turns out Republicans are too shameless to care -- anything to get their tax breaks and patronage favors and to grind workers and their spouses and children to dust.

  Still, one lesson Democrats should draw is to never again nominate anyone so easily viewed as compromised and corrupt.

Daily Log

Looked through my Twitter notifications today for the first time in many weeks. Appreciate the occasional like and/or retweets (mostly from people I recognize), and a couple new followers (272 now), but especially:

nathan @dustybooks - Jul 6
@tomhull747 just fyi I know it's a thankless task but I really enjoy your Weekend Roundup and would miss it (though I'd totally understand)

Finished jazz-pop database file. Now what? Options: vocal-00 (484 artists), jazz-00s (2248). I did jazz-latin (147) in one day, jazz-pop (249) in two days. I figure that means 3-4 days for the vocalists, 15-20 days for the rest. Some while back I predicted it would take until mid-August to finish the database pass. I've only been getting 3-5 days per week, so now that looks optimistic.

Music Week

Music: Current count 28390 [28359] rated (+31), 361 [366] unrated (-5).

Not much to say here. The Pending list is down to five albums, including this week's three arrivals. The new Free Radicals album spent several days in the CD changer, finally replaced by some golden oldies -- Swamp Dogg's "We Need a Revolution" emerged as the perfect soundtrack for reading Bernie Sanders Our Revolution. I was delighted enough by the new Free Radicals album I went back and checked out their five previous albums. Houston band with many hangers-on, similar to Boston's Club D'Elf though less into world music and more into hip-hop.

Aside from Free Radicals, only three more records were reviewed from CD (or CDR), including Chris Pasin's Xmas album, release date October 6. So I spent most of the week scrounging around on Napster, checking out various pop albums including Amber Coffman and Bleachers -- recommended last Friday in Robert Christgau's Expert Witness. Having given Lorde's Melodrama an A-, and Dirty Projectors a C (fairly generous I thought), I've rarely found an EW more out of sync with my ears. Nor did other well-regarded recent albums turn out to be very appealing. I even slogged through The Bob's Burgers Music Album, recommended high in Matt Rice's Mid-Year Top 30 (five more albums I haven't heard on that list, though I'm not in a big hurry to get to At the Drive-In).

One thing I looked for was William Parker's Quartets album (reviewed here by Tim Niland). I didn't find it, but did notice several Parker albums I hadn't heard, especially on the Italian Splasc(H) label, which led me to the albums by Matthew Shipp, Hamid Drake, Daniel Carter, Albert Beger, and Willem Breuker. I gave up on the latter when two Penguin Guide ***(*) records didn't pan out.

Finally, I broke down and started playing some of the downloads I had picked up over the year, including very well regarded albums by Craig Taborn and Harriet Tubman (number two on Chris Monsen's 2017 Favorites list, and number three for Phil Overeem). I still have a couple dozen on the computer, and probably more untapped in my mail files, so I should keep plugging away at this. Playing the new Tomasz Stanko as I write this. Should also see what else (aside from the Mat Maneri) Clean Feed didn't send me.

I'll also note my surprise that both Overeem and Rice are big fans of Zeal & Ardor's Devil Is Fine (number 1 and 2, respectively). Christgau liked the album back in April, and even I gave the record a B+(***) in May, noting: "fuses black field hollers (or chain gang chants) with black metal (and a little xylophone) -- a fairly amusing rather than overbearing combination." Also, I should issue a correction: Overeem lists (at 12) Dalava: The Book of Transfigurations, which last month I incorrectly identified as "self-released." The label is Songlines.

New records rated this week:

• Bleachers: Gone Now (2017, RCA): [r]: B+(*)
• Brother Ali: All the Beauty in This Whole Life (2017, Rhymesayers): [r]: B+(**)
• Amber Coffman: City of No Reply (2017, Columbia): [r]: B+(**)
• Chano Dominguez: Over the Rainbow (2012 [2017], Sunnyside): [dl]: B+(*)
• Free Radicals: Outside the Comfort Zone (2017, Free Rads): [cd]: A-
• Future Islands: The Far Field (2017, 4AD): [r]: B+(*)
• (Sandy) Alex G: Rocket (2017, Domino): [r]: B
• Goldfrapp: Silver Eye (2017, Mute): [r]: B+(*)
• Vitor Gonçalves: Vitor Gonçalves Quartet (2017, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(*)
• Marika Hackman: I'm Not Your Man (2017, Sub Pop): [r]: B+(**)
• Dusan Jevtovic: No Answer (2016 [2017], Moonjune): [cd]: B+(*)
• Mat Maneri/Evan Parker/Lucian Ban: Sounding Tears (2014 [2017], Clean Feed): [cdr]: B+(*)
• Chris Pasin and Friends: Baby It's Cold Outside (2016 [2017], Planet Arts): [cd]: B
• Craig Taborn: Daylight Ghosts (2016 [2017], ECM): [dl]: A-
• Harriet Tubman: Araminta (2013 [2017], Sunnyside): [dl]: A-
• Glenn Zaleski: Fellowship (2014 [2017], Sunnyside): [dl]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

• Battle Hymns (2017, Quasi Band): [dl]: B+(**)
• The Bob's Burgers Music Album (2010-16 [2017], Sub Pop, 2CD): [r]: B+(*)

Old music rated this week:

• Albert Beger's 5: Listening (2004, Earsay): [r]: B+(**)
• Albert Beger/Gerry Hemingway: There's Nothing Better to Do (2011 [2012], OutNow): [bc]: B+(*)
• Willem Breuker Kollektief: In Holland (1981, BV Haast): [r]: B
• Willem Breuker Kollektief: To Remain (1983-89 [1989], BV Haast): [r]: B-
• Daniel Carter/Toby Kasavan/Mark Hennen/William Parker: Feels Like It (2000 [2007], BDE-BDOP): [r]: B+(*)
• Hamid Drake/Albert Beger/William Parker: Evolving Silence Vol. 1 (2005, Earsay): [r]: B+(***)
• Hamid Drake/Albert Beger/William Parker: Evolving Silence Vol. 2 (2005, Earsay): [r]: B+(**)
• Free Radicals: The Rising Tide Sinks All (1998, RWE): [r]: A-
• Free Radicals: Our Lady of Sunny Delights (2000, Rastaman Work Ethic): [r]: B+(**)
• Free Radicals: Aerial Bombardment (2004, Rastaman Work Ethic): [r]: B+(**)
• Free Radicals: The Freedom Fence (2012, Free Radicals): [r]: B+(**)
• Free Radicals: Freedom of Movement (2015, Free Radicals): [r]: B+(***)
• William Parker & the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra: Spontaneous (2002 [2003], Splasc(H)): [r]: B+(*)
• William Parker Bass Quartet Featuring Charles Gayle: Requiem (2004 [2006], Splasc(H)): [r]: B+(**)
• Matthew Shipp Trio: The Trio Plays Ware (2003 [2004], Splasc(H)): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Dave Stryker: Strykin' Ahead (Strikezone): September 1
• Katie Thiroux: Off Beat (Capri): August 17
• Florian Wittenberg: Don't Push the Piano Around (2017, NurNichtNur)

Week Links

Not much to show this week. One problem is that I'm still cramped in terms of what I can search out. Another is that I wasted most of Sunday on a plumbing task instead of putting the time in here. And I must admit that said plumbing task -- installing a new kitchen faucet -- left me embarrassed and exhausted: I figured it might take an hour, but it chewed up more like six (pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong -- from the shutoff valves not working to the supply hoses not being long enough to the drain plumbing not fitting back together again properly) and it involved physical contortions that I'm going to be feeling for at least a week. Moreover, I'm not even sure I like the fancy "touchless" feature, so it's beginning to look like a bad shopping decision -- which may be even more embarrassing.

Normally I feel good upon completing a house project (and, indeed, everything seems to be working properly here, except my shoulders and hips). So maybe more general depression is taking its toll. No doubt many of the links below contributed, although there is an evident shift from stories about the horrors Trump and the Republicans are scheming to thoughts about how best to resist them, and how to build an effective, comprehensible alternate vision.

• Candice Bernd: How the Koch-Backed Effort to Privatize the Veterans Health Administration Jeopardizes Everyone's Health Care Future

• Brian Beutler: Bernie Sanders and the Progressive Left's Selfless Defense of Obamacare:

  It is easy enough to divide liberals between those who think Obamacare was an unlovely half-measure that nevertheless improved on the pre-Obamacare status quo and those who think it was a remarkable achievement on its own (though there is considerable overlap between these two factions). It is nearly impossible to find liberals or leftists of any influence who would sit out the fight over Trumpcare, or join the fight to repeal Obamacare, in order to make things worse in the short term (more than 20 million Americans would lose health insurance) for the better in the long run (single payer). In other words, the left isn't making the perfect the enemy of the good.

  The same cannot be said of conservatives, who define themselves largely by the things they oppose. It is not a coincidence that Republicans failed to develop and build support for an Obamacare alternative over all the years they railed against it. . . . Once again, the left is prioritizing the public interest over expediting its defining ideological priorities, and once again the right is doing just the opposite.

  As the Ryan and McConnell bills have shown, Republicans cannot define a replacement for Obamacare without (a) pointing out many of the concrete achievements of the ACA, and (b) showing people how much they have to lose by repeal/replace.

• Jamelle Bouie: The white nationalist roots of Donald Trump's Warsaw speech; also on the same speech: Walter Shapiro: Donald Trump's warning about 'western civilisation' evokes holy war.

• Elizabeth Douglass: Towns sell their public water systems -- and come to regret it.

• Tom Engelhardt: Aiding and Abetting the Tweeter-in-Chief. TomDispatch also published Danny Sjursen: Fighting the War You Know (Even if It Won't Work), about Trump's "support" for his generals in Afghanistan.

• Henry Farrell: Trump's plan to work with Putin on cybersecurity makes no sense. Here's why.

• Henry Grabar: St Louis Gave Workers a Wage Hike. Missouri Republicans Are Taking It Away:

  Republican-run states forcing Democrat-run cities to not raise the minimum wage is a story we've seen before, of course. Alabama thwarted Birmingham's efforts in February of last year; Ohio stopped Cleveland in December. More than a dozen other states have passed pre-emptive pre-emptions, abolishing municipal wage laws before any cities or counties consider them. GOP politicians usually say minimum wage ordinances won't actually help workers, but they also defend the pre-emptions in principle, because they preserve a "uniform regulatory environment."

• Dilip Hiro: Trump and Saudi Arabia Against the World.

• Christopher Ketcham: The Fallacy of Endless Economic Growth:

  The idea that economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet is the unifying faith of industrial civilization. That it is nonsensical in the extreme, a deluded fantasy, doesn't appear to bother us. We hear the holy truth in the decrees of elected officials, in the laments of economists about flagging GDP, in the authoritative pages of opinion, in the whirligig of advertising, at the World Bank and on Wall Street, in the prospectuses of globe-spanning corporations and in the halls of the smallest small-town chambers of commerce. Growth is sacrosanct.

  One reason American politicians of both parties stress growth so much is that it's the magic elixir that turns pro-business policies into something we can pretend is good for everyone (you know, "trickle down" and all that). Without growth, the only way anyone can improve their lot is at the expense of someone else. But haven't we already been running this experiment for the last forty years, since growth rates in the former "first world" dropped in the 1970s, triggering a feeding frenzy among the rich as they sought to hold their profits up at the expense of workers and customers?

• Mike Konczal: What the stock market's rise under Trump should teach Democrats: Quotes Kevin Phillips describing the Democrats as "history's second-most enthusiastic capitalist party." Lots of folks expected the stock market to do better under Hillary Clinton, but it's actually boomed under Trump, fattening up with the promise of deregulation boosting profits and tax cuts keeping them safe from the government. Turns out that being "second-most" doesn't get you much support from the capitalists even if historically you've run much stronger growth, and defining yourself as a "responsible steward" of the economy doesn't satisfy anyone.

  This approach hit two serious walls in 2016. The first was that people weren't happy with the economy. Nearly three-fourths of people said the country was on the wrong track, with similar numbers describing the economy as rigged. Median household incomes in 2016 had finally inched back to 2007 levels. This lead to a year of awkward juxtapositions, with "America is Already Great" headlines running next to reports on how much life expectancy is falling for white workers. Democrats attacked Trump as a poor steward, someone too unstable and chaotic to run the economy as it was. But that message doesn't motivate voters when they believe the economy isn't working for them.

• Shawn Richman: How Union-Busting Bosses Propel the Right Wing to Power: Book review of the essay collection, Against Labor: How US Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism.

• Joseph Stiglitz: Tell Donald Trump: the Paris climate deal is very good for America; also: Trump's reneging on Paris climate deal turns the US into a rogue state.

• Matt Taibbi: North Korea Isn't the Only Rogue Nuclear State.

• Yanis Varoufakis: A New Deal for the 21st Century:

  Outsiders are having a field day almost everywhere in the West -- not necessarily in a manner that weakens the insiders, but neither also in a way that helps consolidate the insiders' position. The result is a situation in which the political establishment's once unassailable authority has died, but before any credible replacement has been born. The cloud of uncertainty and volatility that envelops us today is the product of this gap.

  For too long, the political establishment in the West saw no threat on the horizon to its political monopoly. Just as with asset markets, in which price stability begets instability by encouraging excessive risk-taking, so, too, in Western politics the insiders took absurd risks, convinced that outsiders were never a real threat.

  One example . . . was building a system of world trade and credit that depended on the booming United States trade deficit to stabilize global aggregate demand. It is a measure of the sheer hubris of the Western establishment that it portrayed these steps as "riskless."

  I don't really understand how Varoufakis' notion of a new New Deal works. Rather, it looks to me like the outsiders he notes, from Trump to Macron, offer no alternative whatsoever to neoliberal orthodoxy. Meanwhile, when a real challenger, like Varoufakis' party in Greece, does manage to win an election they still get beat down.

• George Yancy/Noam Chomsky: On Trump and the State of the Union: An interview with Chomsky, part of "The Stone" series.

• Matthew Yglesias: The most important stories of the week, explained: Trump went to the G20; North Korea tested a missile that could theoretically reach Alaska; CNN and Trump continued their feud; Ted Cruz floated an idea to resurrect Obamacare repeal; the top federal ethics official resigned. Also: Bernie Sanders is the Democrats' real 2020 frontrunner.

One thing I meant to touch on was the term "neoliberalism": my wife got worked up over something Josh Marshall said about that, but as far as I can tell it was only a tweet. I did find this piece from [2016-04-27]: Corey Robin: When Neoliberalism Was Young: A Lookback on Clintonism before Clinton. One thing I learned here was that Charles Peters re-invented the term in the 1970s to describe a faction of pro-business, anti-union, anti-communist, but socially liberal Democrats, which would parallel the evolution of neo-conservatism (pretty much the same cocktail with more emphasis on projecting American military might, and fewer scruples about the company they kept). I had read Peters' Washington Monthly in its infancy and had always admired Peters, so I was a bit taken aback (although I will note that Peters' preference for employee ownership of business over unions is one I share, just not one I espouse in anti-union terms). My own acquaintance with the term "neoliberal" dates from the 1990s, when I associated it with what was then called "the Washington consensus" -- the chief dogma of the IMF and World Bank. As such, it appeared to be defined in terms of US foreign policy: it was basically the carrot as opposed to the neocon stick, although neoconservatives would often adopt it whenever they wanted to present a prettier face (and actually in the IMF's austerity conditions, the veiled threat was often quite palpable).

Until recently, about the only place I ran across "neoliberal" was from left-oriented British critics. I don't have time to try to unpack this here, but outside of the US it's common to regard conservatives as relics and guardians of aristocratic privilege, liberals as individualists who advanced through bourgeois revolts, and the left as more-or-less democratic socialists who tend to favor limiting individual freedom when it conflicts with public good. What distinguishes neoliberals from liberals is that their focus has shifted from the rights of individuals to the demands of capital.

In the US, we've tended to merge our ideas of individual rights and public good, a point reinforced by a history where virtually everything we cherish (as opposed to various things like slavery and ethnic cleansing that fill us with shame) comes from this liberal-left synthesis. On the other hand, there is a small but well-heeled and politically influential faction among Democrats that repeatedly sacrifices the public good for the desires of capital, and "neoliberal" would seem to distinguish them both from people-oriented liberals and from the public-minded left. Certainly not a very elegant term, but until we come up with something better it serves that purpose. Not clear to me whether "neoliberal" as I'm using it here dates back to Charles Peters, but certainly Bill Clinton is an example, as is Andrew Cuomo, and indeed the idea is tempting to any Democrat who depends on high-ticket fundraisers.

Dead Center

Mark Penn/Andrew Stein: Back to the Center, Democrats: Penn was Hillary Clinton's "senior adviser" for her 2008 campaign, which he did more than anyone to destruct and disgrace. Stein was Manhattan Borough president back in the 1990s. Neither figure has any import even among the Clinton faction of the Democratic Party, so it may be unnecessary even to bother with their half-hearted efforts to herd the Democratic Party back toward the "center" -- there must be others who are other who can articulate such views more coherently, but their raw instincts are little different. The one thing they all have in common is a visceral hatred for the left, although in particulars it could take any form that seems convenient. For Penn and Stein, this is built on selective memory:

The path back to power for the Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party.

In the early 1990s, the Democrats relied on identity politics, promoted equality of outcomes instead of equality of opportunity and looked to find a government solution for every problem. After years of leftward drift by the Democrats culminated in Republican control of the House under Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton moved the party back to the center in 1995 by supporting a balanced budget, welfare reform, a crime bill that called for providing 100,000 new police officers and a step-by-step approach to broadening health care. Mr. Clinton won a resounding re-election victory in 1996 and Democrats were back.

In 1996 Clinton's "resounding re-election" came with 49.2% of the vote, leaving Gingrich and the Republicans in complete control of Congress -- "back" only if your entire conception of the Party was Clinton himself. The only bills Clinton was able to pass during his second term were ones the Republicans calculated would hurt and disillusion the Democratic Party base -- "welfare reform," repeal of Glass-Steagall, a capital gains tax cut, a bill which declared "regime change" in Iraq to be US policy. But in wasn't "leftward drift" that cost the Democrats control of Congress in 1994: it was Clinton's "triangulation" (his efforts to win over business support by attacking the party base, especially unions), as exemplified in his decision to prioritize NAFTA over health care, and to forsake traditional Democratic health care proposals in favor of a system that catered an increasingly predatory health care industry.

Still, if Clinton's second term was such a golden age for the Democratic Party, how come they lost two elections to Bush, with the Republicans maintaining control of Congress up to 2006 -- when wild-eyed Howard Dean took control of the DNC? And while Obama won decisively in 2008 with his promise of change (and less soundly in 2012 running on "no change"), it's quite a stretch to blame Hillary Clinton's epic collapse in 2016 on the party's "leftward drift." While Republicans have made huge gains since 2010, you have to ask whether this was abetted by fear of the Democratic left or disgust over the corruption and ineptness of Democratic centrists. One hint: Trump's nickname for Clinton was "Crooked Hillary."

Penn and Stein are not just deluded about history, they've come up with some peculiar ideas about what a "winning strategy" for the Democrats might entail. For instance, they think Democrats can win back the working class through a combination of Trumpian prejudices and "moderate" trade and immigration policies:

Central to the Democrats' diminishment has been their loss of support among working-class voters, who feel abandoned by the party's shift away from moderate positions on trade and immigration, from backing police and tough anti-crime measures, from trying to restore manufacturing jobs. . . .

On trade, Democrats should recognize that they can no longer simultaneously try to be the free-trade party and speak for the working class. They need to support fair trade and oppose manufacturing plants' moving jobs overseas, by imposing new taxes on such transfers while allowing repatriation of foreign profits.

Penn and Stein never mention Clinton's signature NAFTA treaty, which was a direct attack on the working class, and the cause of a massive wave of Mexican emigration -- the other major source of immigrants (poor ones, anyway) has been US wars and US-sponsored dictators around the world. The single most important reason Democrats lost so much of the working class was their failure to protect and support unions -- they were just too busy chasing business donors. Republicans took advantage of that lapse by playing to white prejudices -- their only option, because they don't have any economic answers (but neither do the "centrist" Democrats, despite empty cant like "fair trade").

The reason this op-ed has generated any interest at all is that it raises a real question, obscures another, and is stupid enough it begs you to argue the opposite.

The real question actually has three parts: is the assumption that American politics is laid out on a left-right axis true; if so, is it true that the center has shifted right in recent years; and if so, can the Democrats gain voter share by moving right to recapture that center? "Centrism" depends on all three being true, but there are many problems with each. Many people don't think in terms of left-right (e.g., they consider other terms like integrity, or they focus on non-economic issues). The statistical center has moved different directions on different issues. And both parties obfuscate (rather than change) unpopular positions. But also 30-50% of eligible voters don't vote, so they defy categorization. If you're on the left, you probably think that's because mainstream Democrats haven't given many people credible reasons to vote. That's unproven, but one data point is that Sanders has consistently polled better against Trump than Clinton did. That argues against Penn and Stein.

The obscured question is whether actual Democrats have done better when they moved to the center. Clinton's 1992 campaign was distinctly populist, and Obama seemed to embrace progressive liberalism in 2008. Both moved sharply center/right after those elections, and both lost Congress after two years. Even though both were re-elected, neither regained Congress, and neither managed to get a successor elected. Both oversaw periods with reasonable economic growth which accrued almost exclusively to the very rich, resulting in greater inequality. Both saw (and contributed to) the decline of the public sector, and the deterioration of the safety net -- as a result, average Americans (by definition, the "center" of the electorate) saw their relative welfare decline, their risks increase, and their children's futures diminish. You might argue that median welfare declined less under Clinton and Obama than it did under the Bushes, but in absolute terms the only upward indicator "centrist" Democrats can point to is the personal wealth of the dealmakers at the top. As the quotes above make clear, Penn and Stein do their best to obfuscate this legacy.

The opposite argument -- that Democrats are more likely to win when they move left -- actually has quite a bit of historical support. Both Clinton (in 1992) and Obama (in 2008) ran successful campaigns that promised much more than they delivered or even attempted when they entered office. The Democrats' best election of the last 25 years was in 2006 (actually before the recession in 2008), when the DNC was run by Howard Dean, the self-described champion "of the democratic wing of the Democratic Party." And again, all available evidence shows that Sanders would have fared better than Clinton against Trump.

Would be "centrists" have trouble grasping this because they fail to understand how the current political dynamic destroys any ground the "centrists" try to claim. This is because the two parties are very different in goals and methods. The Republicans were taken over by a faction which relentlessly and insatiably pushes everything to the right, in large part by never conceding anything important to the other side. This doesn't preclude compromise deals, but they always exact a high price from the Democratic Party base, and as such lead those voters to become disenchanted with the Party leadership. They can do this because their policies are compatible with the beliefs of their donors -- to increase corporate power over everyday life, making the rich richer, and punishing whoever stands in their way.

One could imagine a similar dynamic on the left, but as politicians became ever more dependent on donors there has never been a comparable funding option for the left. Instead, what's happened is that "centrist" Democrats have filled the breech, banking the votes of the base while cutting deals with their favored donors -- sometimes incredibly bad deals, like NAFTA and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. In this dynamic, rich donors naturally pressure Democrats to settle with Republicans, yet in the end they wind up backing the Republicans because they can't resist the promise of getting more and more power and wealth. So in this dynamic, the "centrists" screw themselves two ways: they betray their base voters, and they never really get the business support they bargained for. And after repeated failures, it starts to get obvious that they really have nothing to offer. (Hence Penn and Stein wind up pushing "fair trade" and "trying to restore manufacturing jobs.")

There are a few more angles to all of this -- e.g., Democrats hurt themselves enormously when they jump into foreign wars -- but this is the basic dynamic. Penn and Stein don't begin to understand it. For another view on the piece, and some background on who these jokers are, see: Alex Pareene: Mark Penn's Bad Column Also Makes No Goddamn Sense.

Nicholas Lemann offers a sympathetic portrait of the Clintons in his New York Review of Books piece, What Happened to Clintonism? (mostly behind their paywall), based on four recent books: Daryl A Carter: Brother Bill: President Clinton and the Politics of Race and Class; Michael Tomasky: Bill Clinton; William H Chafe: Hillary and Bill: The Clintons and the Politics of the Personal; and Joe Conason: Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton. He does manage to make Clinton seem less sinister than he appears now. To some extent the "political winds" in the early 1990s were blowing in a way that favored someone like Clinton (or Gore), so to some extent he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. (This is not the same thing as popularity within the party. I remain convinced that Jesse Jackson would have won most primaries in 1992 had he run, but I doubt he would have won, and the Party kingmakers were desperate for someone who could win.) And after twelve years of Reagan and Bush, Clinton's centrism still had an aura of plausibility: indeed, if he had a free hand he might have expanded and strengthened the safety net, rolling back the decline of the middle class, while still pursuing his pro-business initiatives. The Republicans deserve much credit (or blame) for wrecking his dream programs, but he shares blame for echoing and legitimizing their concerns and compromising with their schemes.

Conason's book covers the post-presidential years, mostly Clinton's unique combination of vanity and altruism embodied in his Foundation, probably without examining too closely how much money stuck to his fingers on its way from Davos-class donors to the world's needy. It isn't surprising that someone who worked so hard to help his wealthy benefactors make even more should aspire to be one with them, but such upward mobility has neither sharpened his political instincts nor his human empathies -- which in 2016 turned into a liability for Hillary, whose own political ambitions made his philanthropy look more like some kind of political slush fund. Had the Clintons just quietly receded into their newfound wealth few people would have cared much, but having grown wealthy from being president and making their supporters billions of dollars, running again just made them look greedy, and pretending they were running for us just added the insult of hypocrisy.

That Hillary Clinton ultimately lost the election to Donald Trump, and largely because she was the one perceived to be "crooked," is much more than ironic. Given Trump's history and personality, it should have been easy to depict him as greedy and egotistical -- a man who had spent every waking moment of the last fifty years pursuing fame and fortune, one who could hardly be expected to change his stripes the moment he nominally became a public servant. Even looking back it's not clear why Clinton's campaign failed to drive that point home -- it's not so much that they didn't try as didn't manage to be convincing. And while there are many possible reasons for this, the big one was that they spent so much of the campaign being defensive, reeling from the constant barrage of email and foundation scandals.

On the other hand, the Republicans seem to have figured out a very effective way to drive home their "crooked Hillary" meme: social media. Probably the most convincing (and disturbing) piece I've read to date on the campaign is Sue Halpern's How He Used Facebook to Win. The important thing about social media advertising is the degree to which ads can be targeted, so that Trump's people could deliver very precise messages meant to push different user buttons. This, of course, builds on a strategy Republicans have depended on for years now: cultivating single-user voters and stoking their fears to rally them against the Democrats. (Crime comes and goes, but guns and abortion have been especially reliable issues.) There is, of course, a risk in doing this too publicly: it generates a backlash. But highly targeted social media advertising limits unintended visibility, while providing a multiplier effect as fans forward their favored memes to their friends and followers. Here's a sample from the article:

In the early phase of the primaries, Parscale launched Trump's digital operation by buying $2 million in Facebook ads -- his entire budget at the time. He then uploaded all known Trump supporters into the Facebook advertising platform and, using a Facebook tool called Custom Audiences from Customer Lists, matched actual supporters with their virtual doppelgangers and then, using another Facebook tool, parsed them by race, ethnicity, gender, location, and other identities and affinities. From there he used Facebook's Lookalike Audiences tool to find people with interests and qualities similar to those of his original cohort and developed ads based on those characteristics, which he tested using Facebook's Brand Lift surveys. He was just getting started. Eventually, Parscale's shop was reportedly spending $70 million a month on digital advertising, most of it on Facebook. (Facebook and other online venues also netted Trump at least $250 million in donations.)

While it may not have created individual messages for every voter, the Trump campaign used Facebook's vast reach, relatively low cost, and rapid turnaround to test tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of different campaign ads. According to Issie Lapowsky of Wired, speaking with Gary Coby, director of advertising at the Republican National Committee and a member of Trump's digital team:

On any given day . . . the campaign was running 40,000 to 50,000 variants of its ads, testing how they performed in different formats, with subtitles and without, and static versus video, among other small differences. On the day of the third presidential debate in October, the team ran 175,000 variations. Coby calls this approach "A/B testing on steroids."

And this was just Facebook. The campaign also placed ads on other social media, including Twitter and Snapchat, and ran sponsored content on Politico. According to one estimate by a campaign insider, the Trump team spent "in the high eight figures just on persuasion." . . .

There were other digital innovations as well. On election day, for example, the Trump campaign bought all the ad space on YouTube and ran a series of five thirty-second videos, each hosted by a different Trump surrogate representing a particular segment of the Trump base. We "learned that putting Mr. Trump on persuasion ads was a bad idea," Cambridge Analytica's Oczkowski said in April at a meeting of the Association for Data-Driven Marketing and Advertising in Melbourne, Australia. Instead, there was Ivanka Trump, representing mothers and business women; Willie Robertson, the star of the television show Duck Dynasty, to appeal to southerners and hunters; Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, representing law and order and diversity (he is African-American); the former Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell to appeal to veterans and their families; and Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White, a tough, aggressive guy's guy.

"There was no targeting," Oczkowski explained. "Every single American who [went] to YouTube that day [saw these ads]." And, he continued, once viewers watched one of the thirty-second videos to the end, they landed on a screen with a polling place locator. "We had tens of millions of people view the videos and hundreds of thousands of people use the 'find your polling place' locator. When you're talking about winning by thousands of votes, this stuff matters," Oczkowski said.

Parscale's strategy of using Facebook's "dark posts" also turned out to matter, enabling the Trump campaign to attack Clinton with targeted negative ads that flew below the public radar.

Nor was Trump's digital advertising limited to pushing buttons to get potential supporters to come out and vote for him. It was also directed at undermining Hillary Clinton's support by turning potential voters for her off:

"We have three major voter suppression operations under way," a senior campaign official told Bloomberg's Green and Issenberg. One targeted idealistic white liberals -- primarily Bernie Sanders's supporters; another was aimed at young women -- hence the procession of women who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed by the candidate herself; and a third went after African-Americans in urban centers where Democrats traditionally have had high voter turnout. One dark post featured a South Park-like animation narrated by Hillary Clinton, using her 1996 remarks about President Bill Clinton's anti-crime initiative in which she called certain young black men "super predators" who had to be brought "to heel."

"We've modeled this," the unnamed senior campaign official told Green and Issenberg. "It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out." And it did. Democratic turnout in battleground states was weak, which was crucial to Trump's victory. Tallying it up three days after the election, David Plouffe, Obama's 2008 campaign manager, noted:

In Detroit, Mrs. Clinton received roughly 70,000 votes fewer than Mr. Obama did in 2012; she lost Michigan by just 12,000 votes. In Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, she received roughly 40,000 votes fewer than Mr. Obama did, and she lost the state by just 27,000. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, turnout in majority African-American precincts was down 11 percent from four years ago.

Some of these approaches had been worked by Obama's campaign in 2008 and 2012, especially in terms of micro-targeted get-out-the-vote efforts. But there's an essential asymmetry between Republican and Democratic agendas and strategies: Democrats at least try to present a coherent program that offers tangible benefits to voters (even though they, especially recently, have a poor track record of delivering on their promises, nearly every popular benefit ever dates back to Democrats). Republicans, on the other hand, favor intrinsically unpopular policies of increasing the power and wealth of a tiny coterie of elites, so they have few options other than to dissemble and misdirect -- indeed, what seems to work best for them is driving voters into blind rage. The article quotes Laura Quinn, explaining: "Trump didn't have a lot of 'Here is my agenda, here is my narrative, I have to persuade people of it,' . . . The Trump world was more like, 'Let's say a lot of different things, they don't even necessarily need to be coherent, and observe, through the wonderful new platforms that allow you to observe how people respond and observe what works, and whatever squirrel everyone chases, that's going to become out narrative, our agenda, our message.'"

It's tempting to blame all this -- literally the undermining of democracy by special interests spreading unchecked misinformation -- on social media. Indeed, the business model of paying for social media through advertising is quickly becoming as annoying and as distorting as the same model has long been in broadcast media. (Print advertising is somewhat less so because it's easier to pass over -- for that same reason, it is often more informative and less manipulative.) I have an even lower view of advertising, not just because that industry has been the source of such all pervasive techniques as message framing, focus groups, polling, targeting, but because the whole industry is built on the notion that truth is maleable to whatever special interests want it to be. As more and more money is put into the process of manipulating public opinion, actual policies become afterthoughts, not something we agree on because we want or need them, but perks for the political parties most skilled at provoking or stroking our psyches.

Hillary Clinton was unable to defend us from these machinations, partly because her naive faith in the establishment, garnered by living so many years in its bubble, didn't prepare her for such a dirty campaign, and partly because she was so complicit in so many failures of that establishment that she wound up bearing more than her share of the blame -- she even managed to make Donald Trump look like an outsider, an insurgent, a vanquisher (all ridiculous views if you give them a bit of thought). The silver lining in the election is that it frees us from the notion that all is fine and nothing has to change. Had she won, we'd still be struggling with that notion, and the Republicans would still look like a possible way out -- even though they have nothing to offer but worse. Finally, the Democrats can cast off the worst of their legacy (Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, for starters). The center is no longer an option: it's too late, and offers too little.

The Feckless Center

Back around 2000 I worked for a company called Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). They started out in 1979 as one of several group attempting to port AT&T's UNIX operating system to run on Intel microprocessors -- I had a friend in NJ who had the same idea, but SCO turned out to be the only successful company in that niche. Other companies, especially Sun Microsystems, picked the better-suited Motorola microprocessors, but they built their own hardware, whereas SCO did software only, while the PC explosion steadily drove the costs down and power up of commodity Intel systems. By the mid-1990s, you could buy a high-end PC for $5000 or so, spend about $1000 for SCO's UNIX, and have a system that would compete reasonably with a $10000 Sun workstation. That was a good niche for SCO, and they grew to be a fairly sizable company. And when Intel announced they'd be developing 64-bit processors, SCO was looking to move further upscale.

Alas, that didn't happen. SCO's business cratered after the Y2K bubble burst. That's what I predicted would happen. Part of the problem was that Microsoft was chasing the same market with their NT operating system running on the same Intel hardware. Part was that by the time SCO wrangled control of UNIX AT&T and Novell had already pocketed much of the OEM licensing stream. And perhaps the most important part was that SCO was stuck in a price structure that couldn't adjust to lower hardware prices or competition -- least of all from the open source Linux operating system.

I summed up this problem succinctly at the time: I argued that SCO could continue to sell its UNIX to people who were too smart to go with NT, or SCO could sell its UNIX to people who were too dumb to switch to and support Linux, but they couldn't do both at the same time. What would happen, of course, was that both sides would erode their advantages, and both sides would undercut their price structure. Of course, I got laid off for my trouble, but that, too, is not the point.

What reminded me of this story was an New York Times op-ed, by Mark Penn/Andrew Stein: Back to the Center, Democrats, where they argue:

The path back to power for the Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party.

In the early 1990s, the Democrats relied on identity politics, promoted equality of outcomes instead of equality of opportunity and looked to find a government solution for every problem. After years of leftward drift by the Democrats culminated in Republican control of the House under Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton moved the party back to the center in 1995 by supporting a balanced budget, welfare reform, a crime bill that called for providing 100,000 new police officers and a step-by-step approach to broadening health care. Mr. Clinton won a resounding re-election victory in 1996 and Democrats were back.

Ah, God bless selective memory. Gingrich and the Republicans didn't wrangle control of Congress until two years after Bill Clinton was elected president, by which time he had established his balanced budget fetish, passed the job-killing/union-busting NAFTA, and seen his corrupt health care plan blow up. He did move further to the right in 1996, but his "resounding victory" in 1996 only got him 49.2% of the vote, nor were the Democrats "back": Republicans still controlled both houses of Congress, and they made sure that Clinton's only second term accomplishments were things that hurt and disillusioned the Democratic Party base: wrecking welfare, more trade deals, bombing Iraq, cutting capital gains taxes, repealing Glass-Steagall -- you know, things Penn advised him to do.

Still, if Clinton's second term was such a golden age for the Democratic Party, how could Bush have won in 2000 and 2004? And why were the big Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008 spearheaded by Democrats -- Howard Dean and Barack Obama -- who campaigned well to the left of, and for Obama personally against, Clinton? And how can Penn and Stein blame Sanders and Warren for the epic collapse of the Democratic ticket in 2016 when the name at the top was Hillary Clinton?

To reach their delusions, Penn and Stein have to be stupid about many things. For instance:

Central to the Democrats' diminishment has been their loss of support among working-class voters, who feel abandoned by the party's shift away from moderate positions on trade and immigration, from backing police and tough anti-crime measures, from trying to restore manufacturing jobs.

The main reason Democrats lost working class support is that they failed to protect the unions that defended jobs and lifted wages and benefits. I don't recall any workers or unions lobbying for "moderate" trade deals like Clinton's NAFTA -- which, by the way, triggered a massive increase in immigration because it did even more damage to agricultural jobs in Mexico than it did to manufacturing in the US. One may debate whether all that immigration has further hurt American workers. I think it has, although not very much -- certainly much less than the relentless attack on unions. Of course, nowhere do Penn/Stein mention unions, but they do have more about trade:

On trade, Democrats should recognize that they can no longer simultaneously try to be the free-trade party and speak for the working class. They need to support fair trade and oppose manufacturing plants' moving jobs overseas, by imposing new taxes on such transfers while allowing repatriation of foreign profits.

Uh, how exactly does "allowing repatriation of foreign profits" keep companies from moving jobs overseas? The idea here is that if we cut corporate taxes big companies would be more likely to bring some of their profits back to be invested or paid out in the US, but one may wonder whether that's actually true. Even so, it sounds more like an incentive for those companies to invest more abroad. Nor do I see how "new taxes" might work. If you want to get serious about reversing the export of manufacturing jobs, he most effective thing you could do would be to shift control of companies toward the people who work those jobs -- stronger unions would help here, and employee ownership would be even better.

It shouldn't be surprising that the political center has failed, for much the reason SCO couldn't sustain interest in the middle ground between Microsoft and Linux. The two operating systems are based on diametrically opposed notions of trust and enterprise: either you surrender to a (supposedly benign but expensive) corporate master, or you struggle in a free world that depends on everyone helping one another out. Similarly, right and left ofter polar opposite views of the world, so much so that people who try to stradle them can never satisfy either nor build a stable constituency of their own.

Daily Log

Cut this from the above:

They [Penn/Stein] only get more ridiculous after that. My favorite line is when they demand that the Democrats ditch caucuses in favor of primaries:

Yet moderate viewpoints are given short shrift in the presidential nominating process. Democrats should change their rules to eliminate all caucuses in favor of primaries. Caucuses are largely undemocratic because they give disproportionate power to left-leaning activists, making thousands of Democrats in Kansas more influential than millions of people in Florida.

I'm flattered, but while I voted for Sanders, I had virtually nothing to do with Sanders getting 70% in Kansas.

Music Week

Music: Current count 28359 [28324] rated (+35), 366 [368] unrated (-2).

Most of the week's new finds made it into the June Streamnotes post which came out on Friday -- the best new one is yet another good one from François Carrier. The Streamnotes post included a 30-album wild-ass guess at what a mid-year critics poll list might look like, with my grades for the 27 albums I had checked out. I've since added the 3 I had missed, so the top-30 grade curve looks like this:

7. A-: Kendrick Lamar, Lorde, The XX, Syd, Run the Jewels, Khalid, Joey Bada$$
5. B+(***): Migos, Spoon, Chris Stapleton, Paramore, Jens Lekman
5. B+(**): Future, Vince Staples, SZA, Japandroids, Cloud Nothings
8. 8+(*): Sampha, Drake, Thundercat, Jay Som, Mount Eerie, Slowdive, Laura Marling, Stormzy
1. B: Arca
3. B-: Father John Misty, Perfume Genius, Magnetic Fields
1. C: Dirty Projectors

That's still pretty left-shifted from normal, but note I decided to include Jens Lekman and Magnetic Fields (both Christgau picks) instead of artists with more supporting data such as Ryan Adams, Julie Byrne, Alex G, and/or Harry Styles. I'll also concede that I can imagine other people liking most of the bottom half of the list more than I do (well, Perfume Genius and Dirty Projectors seem pretty hard to like).

I got a couple of reprieves from my computer problems. The website ISP found a bit of free disk space, but at 95% used it could go away fast, and the company has become impossible to communicate with. I got around my local browser problem by switching to Chromium, which has held up fairly well, although I haven't put anyway near the load on it I used to do with Firefox. I still need to save everything off, do a fresh operating system load, and put it all back together again, but it's tempting to keep muddling by for a while until I face up to all that. It would be good, for instance, to update the Christgau website before I break my local copy. It would be even better if I could migrate the website to HTML5 and UTF-8 when it comes back. Presumably there are tools that help with that sort of thing, but I haven't searched them out yet. We've also talked a bit about making it more phone-friendly or even converting it to some kind of phone ap, but that's another learning curve. Anyone who has advice or suggestions about this, please get in touch through normal channels.

Tried turning on the old Dell laptop today, but it came up with an ominous message about the "disk drive failing" that suggests it's soon to be a goner. It's running Ubuntu 10.04, so it's even further behind than my main machine. For most practical purposes I replaced it with a Chromebook a few years ago, but I never got into the habit of using cloud storage, so I really just use it for web surfing. I suppose a new real laptop is in order.

Meanwhile, about the only thing I've actually been enjoying has been cooking. The hardest thing has been lining up guests so I get an excuse to stretch a little -- I still haven't done the big Korean bash I planned out 3-4 months ago. I did cook Indian for my sister's birthday, but that's about all. On the other hand, I've been picking up small packages of meat and scattered vegetables that I can cook for the two of us. Today I turned a pound of hamburger into picadillo -- sort of a Cuban sloppy joe mix -- served with pan-fried potatoes and fried egg (a "caballo").

Lately I've found myself going back to Chinese recipes, some I haven't made in years. On Sunday I made a version of sweet & sour pork and some fried rice. I made lettuce wraps with a chicken and pine nut filling and fried cellophane noodles. I found some frozen pork chops and turned them into pork & pickle soup (the "pickle" is Szechuan preserved vegetable -- mustard stem), adding some dried mushrooms. Another time I made braised pork ribs with fermented black beans. Then there was the "hoisin-exploded" chicken. I have a pretty good pantry of Chinese odds and ends, so I can usually turn a package of meat or fish and whatever vegetables are handy into a remarkably tasty meal. The hard part is keeping fresh scallions and ginger on hand.

My mother was the master of always having a pantry (and two freezers) stocked with anything she might need should, say, a relative show up in need of a full meal and maybe a pie or cake. After she died, I made three typical cakes, knowing that all the ingredients would be on hand. We grew up on stories of Aunt Hester receiving guests at 3AM with full meals prepared on her wood-fired stove. I don't think Mom ever had to do that, but she was prepared.

New records rated this week:

• Algiers: The Underside of Power (2017, Matador): [r]: B-
• Sheryl Bailey & Harvie S: Plucky Strum: Departure (2017, Whaling City Sound): [cd]: B+(*)
• Erik Bogaerts/Hendrik Lasure/Pit Dahm: Bogaerts & Lasure + Dahm (2016, self-released): [bc]: B-
• Burial: Subtemple/Beachfires (2017, Hyperdub, EP): [r]: B
• Julie Byrne: Not Even Happiness (2017, Ba Da Bing): [r]: B+(**)
• François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Rafal Mazur: Oneness (2015 [2017], FMR): [cd]: A-
• Playboi Carti (2017, AWGE/Interscope): [r]: B+(*)
• Cashmere Cat: 9 (2017, Mad Love/Interscope): [r]: B+(*)
• Dirty Projectors: Dirty Projectors (2017, Domino): [r]: C
• Silke Eberhard Trio: The Being Inn (2016 [2017], Intakt): [cd]: A-
• Emperor X: Oversleepers International (2017, Tiny Engines): [r]: B+(***)
• Noga Erez: Off the Radar (2017, City Slang): [r]: B
• The Feelies: In Between (2017, Bar/None): [r]: B+(**)
• Forest Swords: Compassion (2017, Ninja Tune): [r]: B-
• Llop: J.Imp (2017, El Negocito): [cd]: B+(*)
• Lorde: Melodrama (2017, Lava/Republic): [r]: A-
• Father John Misty: Pure Comedy (2017, Sub Pop): [r]: B-
• Oddisee: The Iceberg (2017, Mello Music Group): [r]: A-
• Aruán Ortiz: Cubanism: Piano Solo (2016 [2017], Intakt): [cd]: B+(**)
• Mike Reed: Flesh & Bone (2016 [2017], 482 Music): [cd]: B+(***)
• Smino: Blkswn (2017, Zero Fatigue/Downtown): [r]: B+(**)
• Songhoy Blues: Résistance (2017, Fat Possum): [r]: B+(**)
• Sorority Noise: You're Not as ___ as You Think (2017, Triple Crown): [r]: B+(**)
• Vince Staples: Big Fish Theory (2017, Def Jam): [r]: B+(**)
• SZA: Ctrl (2017, Top Dawg/RCA): [r]: B+(**)
• Mat Walerian/Matthew Shipp/William Parker: Toxic: This Is Beautiful Because We Are Beautiful People (2015 [2017], ESP-Disk): [r]: B+(**)

Old music rated this week:

• Emperor X: Tectonic Membrane/Thin Strip on an Edgeless Platform (2004, Discos Mariscos): [r]: B+(**)
• Wallace Roney: According to Mr. Roney (1988-91 [1997], 32 Jazz, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Wallace Roney: No Job Too Big or Too Small (1987-93 [1999], Savoy Jazz): [r]: B+(***)
• Wallace Roney: Mistérios (1994, Warner Brothers): [r]: B-
• Wallace Roney: No Room for Argument (2000, Stretch): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• François Carrier/Michel Lambert/Rafal Mazur: Oneness (FMR)
• Free Radicals: Outside the Comfort Zone (Free Rads): September 23
• Dusan Jevtovic: No Answer (Moonjune)
• Chris Pasin and Friends: Baby It's Cold Outside (Planet Arts): October 6
• Talinka: Talinka (Moonjune)

Miscellaneous notes:

• Wallace Roney: According to Mr. Roney (1988-91 [2010], Savoy Jazz, 2CD): B+(**)
• Wallace Roney: No Job Too Big or Too Small (1987-93 [1999], Savoy Jazz): B+(***)

Week Links

Last week I contemplated suspending Weekend Roundup. Partly I was having grave computer problems that made surfing the web ever more painful, and partly I was just disgusted with all the insane things Trump and the Republicans are doing. Since then I tried Google's Chromium browser and it's working better (although not perfectly, and without NoScript I'm seeing a lot of annoying JavaScript I never had to deal with before).

So I figured I'd compromise by just jotting down a few links without comments, although sometimes I couldn't help myself. Also because shit's happening so fast, I figured I should jot down a date for each linked page (when I remembered to do so). Then I wrote an introduction.

Meanwhile, I slogged through Noam Chomsky's essay collection, Who Rules the World? I didn't learn a lot I didn't already know, but I started out in a bad mood about America's many wars, so I didn't mind Chomsky being even harsher than I would be. Still, I wanted something lighter next, and settled for Bernie Sanders' post-campaign book. Only about 100 pages into it -- still pre-Iowa, when he was a very longshot, yet still no more improbable than the mess we wound up with. I talked to a friend last week who was still complaining about "Bernie or bust" -- people who held out for something more while most of us were willing to settle for much less (damn near nothing).

Five months in, I think we can draw some clear conclusions about Donald Trump as President. One is that he's a lot more ignorant about everything a national political leader does (or should do) than pretty much anyone imagined -- including those of us who have long feared what we thought would be the worst. One manifestation of this is that he has no clue how to get anything done, and his ideas about what to do rarely rise above his sociopathic prejudices.

The second, which was easier to predict from his campaign, is that his shameless disregard for truth is orders of magnitude beyond anything Washington -- a notorious haven for dissemblers -- has ever encountered. The media literally have no idea where to begin, because there are no fixed points to navigate by.

The third is that Trump has belied every intimation he made on the campaign trail that he might break with Republican Party orthodoxy and forge a new direction: nationalist, for sure, but giving government a more humane role at home and a less aggressive one at home. This not only didn't happen; as many of us suspected, it never had a chance. Trump's trifecta of ignorance, incompetence, and dishonesty (for lack of a better word -- mendacious implies he's somewhat clever, and even bullshit suggests a hidden agenda) has left his administration in the malevolent hands of Republican apparatchiks and their billionaire masters.

His only authentic (in the sense of things he personally decided) moves so far have been hiring relatives and touring his personal properties -- things he's been doing for decades. And when he's not indulging his oversized ego, he's doing what he's always tried to do: make money. He's not responsible for creating Washington's ubiquitous culture of graft, but he exemplifies it, especially by making sure he's getting his cut.

Still, since Mitch McConnell unveiled his hitherto secret health care bill (the BRCA, like the breast cancer gene -- it seems immune to adding a "Care" suffix because it clearly doesn't), Trump's own personal garishness has taken a back seat (despite eruptions like the Mika Brzezinski flap) to his adopted party's crusade not just to coddle and elevate the rich but also to demean and hurt the poor (and anyone else they can organize their disdain against). This should have been clear years ago, but centrist Democrats and the bought-and-aid-for media have perpetuated the myth that they can work with moderate counterparts among the Republicans. But while Clinton and Obama never pointed to the obvious, Trump inadvertently made the point when he complained of not having a chance to get a single Democratic vote for his "repeal-and-replace Obamacare" bill. At least this answers the thought experiment: how bad does a bill have to be to not get a single sell-out Democrat?

Still, Republicans are using their thin Congressional margins, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, and anything that can be done through executive orders (or not done by turning a blind eye to enforcement on matters like civil rights, environment, and antitrust), to push its anti-popular (and frequently downright unpopular) agenda through. Just this last week, Trump's travel ban order got a reprieve from the Supreme Court, and the House passed two anti-immigrant bills (certain to fall short of the 60 votes the Senate used to require, but McConnell may still get creative there).

It's hard to say whether Trump's chaos (for lack of a better word, although I was tempted by "insanity") is making their efforts easier or harder. Matthew Yglesias sums this up in Why Donald Trump can't make deals in Washington:

It seems paradoxical that you could combine the party discipline needed to push controversial and unpopular legislation through on a party line vote with total disengagement on the part of the party's top leader. But the Trump administration seems to feature just the right mix of chaos and conventionality to make it work. Both Vice President Mike Pence and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus are very conventional Republicans with deep ties to the congressional party. That seems to be good enough to ensure that Trump will take his cues from Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell regardless of his personal instincts. Trump triumphed over the GOP's leadership during the 2016 primary, but he has largely surrendered to them on policy questions.

The result is that deals get done -- or not -- by the party's congressional leadership. The ability to legislate hinges on Ryan and McConnell being able to agree among themselves. Trump serves as an ineffectual figurehead, talking tough but not really being able to engage with the policy details enough to properly negotiate an unprecedented rollback of the welfare state.

Here's another writer who understands that no matter how personally noxious Donald Trump may be, his administration is doing pretty exactly what any Republican administration would be doing given the same powers: Alex Pareene: This Is Normal:

What most of the worst people in Donald Trump's administration have in common is that they are Republicans. This simple fact is obscured sometimes by the many ways in which Trump is genuinely an aberration from the political norm -- like his practice of naked nepotism rather than laundering the perpetuation of class advantage through a "meritocratic" process -- and by the fact that many of the most vocal online spokespeople for "the resistance" ignore the recent history of the Republican Party in favor of a Trump-centric theory of How Fucked Up Everything Is.

But it is necessary for liberals, leftists, and Democrats to actually be clear on the fact that the Republican Party is responsible for Trump. The Democrats' longterm failure to make a compelling and all-encompassing case against conservatism and the GOP as institutions, rather than making specific cases against specific Republican politicians, is one of the reasons the party is currently in the political wilderness. . . .

Next time you boggle at the sight of the president's unqualified son-in-law flying to Iraq to get briefed by generals on the facts on the ground, remember that George W. Bush sent a business school chum to privatize Iraq's economy and a 24-year-old with no relevant experience to reopen the Iraqi stock market.

The worst members of Trump's cabinet -- Jeff Sessions, Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos -- are Republicans. Their analogues in any possible alternate Republican presidency would've been basically identical in how they carried out their work. Jeb Bush would've signed the AHCA. Marco Rubio would've sold arms to Saudi Arabia. John Kasich would've abided the theft of a Supreme Court seat and selected a justice just as conservative as Neil Gorsuch, if not Gorsuch himself.

None of those men would've lobbed crude personal insults at cable show hosts. They wouldn't have been as cartoonishly, personally corrupt in their business dealings (though scores of their appointees would have been). But even the most consequential way in which Trump differs from a hypothetical alternate Republican president, his blatant obstruction of the investigation into whether or not he is somehow compromised by or in league with the Russian government, has almost no real-world consequences, compared to his (bog-standard Republican) international and domestic policy agendas. When Mitch McConnell's underhanded legislative maneuvering is included in a list of ways in which Trump is normalizing authoritarianism, you give the president far too much credit and the Republican Party far too little.

Meanwhile, here are links (mostly without comments) to some stories I noticed:

• Zeeshan Aleem: Trump just made a humiliating economic error in front of South Korea's president [06-30]: Confusing trade deficits with national debt. The bigger problem -- assuming confirmation of Trump's duncehood is no surprise -- is that US has historically bought South Korean alliance by supporting its export-driven economic growth, a strategy undercut by Trump's "America First" demagoguery -- oddly at a time when Trump's blundering has triggered another confrontation with North Korea. Also see: Jason Ditz: Trump: North Korea Should Be Dealt With Rapidly: but how? "South Korea and China had both been said in recent weeks to have presented the Trump administration a diplomatic resolution, but to have been dismissed out of hand, with the administration ruling out any deal that reduces the 'military pressure' on North Korea."

• Zack Beauchamp: This chilling NRA ad calls on its members to save America by fighting liberals

• Ari Berman: The Trump Administration Is Planning an Unprecedented Attack on Voting Rights

• Aaron Blake: Kellyanne Conway would like to question the media's patriotism -- because Mika Brzezinski questioned President Trump's [06-30]

• Esme Cribb: No Staff Members Left in Science Division of White House Office [07-01]

• Chas Danner: Christie Shuts Down New Jersey Government, State Beaches and Parks Closed [07-01]

• David A Farenthold: A Time magazine with Trump on its cover hangs in his golf clubs. It's fake. [06-27]

• Michelle Goldberg: Trump No Longer Seems Able to Hide His Raw Misogyny.

• Richard Goldstein: Jupiter Rising: On Macron and France.

• Glenn Greenwald: CNN Journalists Resign: Lastest Example of Media Recklessness on the Russia Threat

• William Greider: Worried About Those Global Cyber Attacks? They Were Started by Washington

• Alex Isenstadt/Josh Dawsey: Senate GOP seethes at Trump impulsiveness [06-27]: Sour grapes about Trump's inadvertent mucking with 2018 Senate prospects; e.g., his PAC attacks against Dean Heller (R-NV), who must be one of the most endangered Republican incumbents (otherwise why would he break with Trump over gutting of ACA?).

• Annie Karni/Nahal Toosi: Tight circle of security officials crafted Trump's Syria warning [06-27]: Curious that Trump's claim that "new intelligence" indicated that Syria was planning on launching a chemical weapons attack appeared almost immediately after Seymour Hersh reported that US intelligence agencies didn't believe reports of a previous attack that Trump used as pretext for his cruise missile volley against a Syrian Air Force base (see: Trump's Red Line). Also note that Trump and company claimed their warning had worked a mere two days after it was issued (see: Michael D Shear: White House Warning Halted Syria Chemical Attack, Officials Say [06-28].

• Jeremy Kryt: Inside Trump's Disastrous 'Secret' Drug War Plans for Central America [07-01]

• Martin Longman: And Now the Trump Presidency Begins to Fail for Real [06-29]: Well, Trump has settled on a strategy of trying to pass everything with straight party votes, further angering Democrats by using executive power to reverse virtually everything associated with Obama -- in effect, he's not only set out to erase the last eight years, he's more explicit about that than any president ever. (Too bad Obama did just the opposite, even though GW Bush left him a lot that should have been rolled back.) Health care is merely the most obvious example, because Republicans made it one eight years ago, leaving Democrats with no option other than to pass the ACA on a straight party vote. But this dynamic applies to lots of things, and there's no reason to think taxes, infrastructure, or immigration will turn out any different. And note that a big part of Trump's problem with pressing his partisan majority is that he can't win without support of the tea party faction (or whatever they call themselves these days) and those guys have learned to leverage their numbers, basically to block anything that isn't extreme enough. Thus, the House AHCA initially failed, only to pass after the leadership made it more hurtful and even less popular. Needless to say, that just encourages the extreme right to become even more aggressive. On the other hand, Trump closed off the option (if it ever existed) of moving toward the center when he staffed his administration and started his Obama purge. So, yeah, getting things done is going to be difficult for Trump. On the other hand, his capacity to wreck our world is still quite extraordinary, so I wouldn't start celebrating yet.

• German Lopez: Trump's "election integrity" commission wants every voter's name, party ID, and address [06-30]: This is Kris Kobach, a reach which far exceeds anything Russia has been accused of trying to hack. Such a database would be very useful for political operators. Article has much background info on Republican voter suppression efforts, which is what "voter fraud" is really all about. Aside from the politics, another obvious problem is noted here: Eric Geller/Cory Bennett: Trump voter-fraud panel's data request a gold mine for hackers, experts warn. Meanwhile, instead of backing away from such an obviously bad idea, Trump is doubling down: Esme Cribb: Trump Rails Against States Rejecting His Shady Election Commission's Requests.

• Hugh Miles: Al-Jazeera, insurgent TV station that divides the Arab world, faces closure: Shutting down the closest thing the Arab world has to a free press is one of Saudi Arabia's key demands before they will consider calling off their blockade of Qatar, and the one that's most clearly offensive to anyone in any country that has a relatively free press.

• Mark Perry: Tillerson and Mattis Cleaning Up Kushner's Middle East Mess [06-26]

• Brad Palmer/Nadja Popovich: As Climate Changes, Southern States Will Suffer More Than Others: Florida, of course, but Texas and Arizona are conspicuously red on this map. Authors argue that the poorest counties will suffer most, but it seems obvious to me that relatively rich individuals will be hardest hit -- e.g., it's not poor people who own all that beachfront property soon to be submerged. Another article notes Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising, Even as Emissions Stabilize.

• Alex Pareene: Donald Trump Is Getting Played Like a Sucker by His Own Budget Guy [05-26]: "Democrats dream of running against budgets like the one drawn up by Mulvaney. It neuters Trump's single greatest political advantage, which is that a sizable number of whites in the Rust Belt convinced themselves that Trump was something other than a Mitt Romney-style plutocratic Republican." I had lost track of Pareene, but looks like he's been at Fusion for some time. Some older posts that caught my eye: Maybe We Need That Hillary Clinton Dark Money Group Now [06-21]; Alex Pareene: Stop Enabling the Nihilist Republican Shrug [06-01]; Actually, Why Not Cancel the White House Press Briefing? [05-12] ("A room full of people who know the man answering their questions cannot possibly truthfully answer their questions makes for great TV, but it does not make for meaningful coverage of the White House"); Airlines Can Treat You Like Garbage Because They Are an Oligopoly [04-11]; I Don't Want to Hear Another Fucking Word About John McCain Unless He Dies or Actually Does Something Useful for Once [02-17]. Perhaps best is The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face [04-05]; e.g.:

  Trump was always venal, dishonest, genuinely deluded about his financial acumen and business success, and, you know, a wildly misogynistic accused rapist and sexual harasser. But for most of his public life, he also clearly knew the right sorts of things to say to sound like a reasonable person, albeit a mostly ridiculous one. Donald Trump the deranged believer of bizarre untruths about the world at large is actually a fairly recent development. . . . Trump learned what to think about the world at large from the media, and for most of his life, he was a consumer of the mainstream media.

  Donald Trump today is a cruel dolt turned into a raving madman by cable news and Breitbart.com. You could see the descent happen during the Obama era, in concert with the broader maddening of the GOP. The major difference between Trump and the other old white men who've been radicalized by the conservative press is that his was a strangely self-directed conversion, based on his desire to make himself known as a plausible Republican presidential candidate. . . .

  Now, and for the foreseeable future, the grifter-in-chief sits alone in the White House residence every night, watching cable news tell him comforting lies -- that he's a hugely popular president, that responsibility for his myriad setbacks and failures lies with the many powerful enemies aligned against him a grand conspiracy -- in between the ads for reverse mortgages and "all-natural male enhancement." There's an image of America in the age of the complete triumph of bullshit. You spend a few years selling lousy steaks to suckers, then one morning you wake up and you're the sucker -- and the steak.

• Frank Rich: Nixon, Trump, and How a Presidency Ends: More on Nixon than on Trump, but the relevance is clear. One note I wasn't aware of is that the House impeachment committee considered charging Nixon with violating the "emoluments clause," which Trump has flagrantly violated since taking office. Another is a Gary Wills quote about Nixon's help: "a world of little men using large powers incompetently from a combination of suspicion and panic." As I recall, Nixon and his "little men" were less worried about what was being investigated than what else the investigators might find, and that's surely true of Trump too.

• Corey Robin: If Republicans lose the healthcare fight, it's the beginning of the end: One note here is that in 1977, 1983 and 1993 "the federal government launched a major retrenchment of Social Security" -- all three were bipartisan efforts, two signed by Democratic presidents, but this time Democrats aren't going to give Republicans cover for their cuts and the misery they cause. This makes me think Republicans should worry more about passing their bill, but they're pretty locked into their delusions. Still, note this:

  One reason the Republicans are having such a hard time of it is that the public is overwhelmingly against the Senate bill. As Politico recently reported, Senate phones have been ringing off the hook -- almost entirely from citizens opposed to what the Republicans are doing.

  A staffer for Mississippi senator Thad Cochran claims his office received 226 constituent calls over a four-day period: two in favor of the Republican bill, 224 against. And, yes, you read that correctly. Not Massachusetts. Mississippi.

• Jordan Rudner: Donald Trump's Supreme Court Justice Did a Lot of Horrible Things Today [06-26]: Subheds: He opposed a ruling that gave same-sex parents equal rights; He made it clear how he'll side on Trump's travel ban; He helped vote to send a man to death in Texas; He tried to take on a case that could further weaken gun control laws; He voted to strike down a barrier between church and state

• Christopher Sellers: Trump and Pruitt are the biggest threat to the EPA in its 47 years of existence [07-01]

• Matt Taibbi: With CNN Flap, Media's Trump-Era Identity Crisis Continues [06-28]: "Donald Trump's great talent as a politician -- some might call it an anti-talent -- is his ability to bring everyone down to his level." Also Megyn Kelly Vivisects Bloated Conspiracy Hog Alex Jones [06-20].

• Jeffrey Toobin: The National Enquirer's Fervor for Trump: "Throughout the 2016 Presidential race, the Enquirer embraced Trump with sycophantic fervor. The magazine made its first political endorsement ever, of Trump, last spring." Related: Gabriel Sherman: What Really Happened Between Donald Trump, the Hosts of Morning Joe, and the National Enquirer [06-30].

• Matthew Yglesias: The most important stories of the week, explained [06-30]: CBO released its analysis of Senate GOP health bill; Trump's travel ban finally went into effect; the EU slapped Google with a $2.7 billion fine; Elizabeth Warren endorsed single-payer health care; Donald Trump held his first Trump fundraiser at the Trump hotel. Google was found in violation of EU antitrust laws for perverting its search results in favor of its advertisers. That should be illegal here, too. The fundraiser may have struck people as odd given that he famously self-financed his 2016 campaign. Yglesias writes:

  While some politicians would go the extra mile to avoid even the appearance of personally profiting from the presidency, this was the clearest sign yet that Trump revels in it -- donors know they are putting money directly in Trump's pocket via the hotel fees, Trump knows it too, and the donors know that he knows it.

  Yglesias also wrote: Republicans' health bill saves its most severe Medicaid cuts for outside the CBO's scoring window; The 3 leading conservative cases for the Senate health bill, explained. Needless to say, those "cases" range from bad to fraud. From the second article:

  One key thing to understand is that even though the bill would set Medicaid on a course that makes cuts to coverage and services inevitable, it defers all the actual decision-making to governors and state legislatures. The effect is that the political pain for making the cuts will probably fall on state-level actors rather than congressional ones, letting the members of Congress whose actions made the cuts inevitable evade accountability.

Note: It was impossible for me to follow various links that loooked interesting due to aggressive gatekeeping. This included Business Insider, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal. Also annoying: The Guardian, The Nation. I subscribe to The Nation, so should be able to work around that, but the new browser doesn't have the right account info.

Jun 2017