Daily Log

Replied to a twitter thread. It seems to have started with Dave Weigel, who wrote:

To understand Bidenmentum, you've got to have some of the conversations I had yesterday: Middle-aged women explaining that 2016 showed that voters won't elect a female president, so they've got to be strategic.

Kathleen Geier wrote:

This is so depressing. Countries like Argentina, Chile, Liberia, and Taiwan have elected women presidents. Are those countries less sexist than the US? Just because Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate who ran a lousy campaign doesn't mean another woman can't win.

I responded:

Only reason I can think of why significant numbers of voters reject any woman candidate is that the US has been on a constant war footing since 1948, and that's seeped deep into our pores; ironically, overcompensating hawks like H Clinton scare more voters than they win over.

Wrote this up as a proposal for Mike and Ram:

Been kicking around various ideas, and thought this one might be worth sharing. I've spent a lot of time thinking about a political book, built around the idea that US history breaks neatly into four eras: 1800-1860, 1860-1932, 1932-1980, and 1980-2020. Each begins with a legendary president (Jefferson, Lincoln, FD Roosevelt, Reagan) and ends with a tragically inept one-termer (Buchanan, Hoover, Carter, and Trump). (In this regard, one could also cite 1788-1800, Washington-to-Adams, but that doesn't seem quite long enough to count. Each era was dominated by a single political party, although each had two minor breaks for presidents from the other party -- in three cases two for two terms each (Cleveland and Wilson, Eisenhower and Nixon, Clinton and Obama); in the 1800-1860 period the Whig party managed to win two elections with former generals (Harrison and Taylor), but they both died in office and were succeeded by exceptionally unpopular VPs (Tyler and Fillmore). Within each era, not only was one party dominant, but the other party tended to mimic the dominant party: most obviously, how Eisenhower and Nixon supported and extended New Deal reforms, while Clinton and Obama willingly gave ground to the pro-market, small-government Republican agenda. (The earlier eras are more mixed, partly because the dominant party was itself evolving. Cleveland, for instance, was more conservative than the most pro-business Republican of his day, while Wilson was relatively progressive, admittedly with certain blinders, most notoriously race.)

The Reagan-to-Trump era differs from the others in several respects. The first three eras started with major shifts to the left: the spread of democracy under Jefferson and Jackson; the end of slavery with Lincoln; Roosevelt's New Deal. Reagan led a backlash, aimed at making Americans less equal, at reducing democracy, and at limiting the rights of most Americans. Although Republicans captured the levers of power and dominated the public agenda, their program was never very popular, their winning margins (aside from Reagan's two elections) slim (twice, at least by actual votes, negative). The eras subdivide, this one breaking down into three waves as presidential power (Reagan, Bush, Trump) did their damage, separated by breaks which allowed the economy to recover (from the first Bush recession of 1992 and the much larger Bush recession of 2008), and the Republicans to recharge (taking control of Congress in 1994 and 2010, kneecapping the Democrats from making changes).

My original idea was to start with this framework, then expand on how Democrats should view 2020 as an epochal, era-ending election, an opportunity not just to reverse the Reagan-to-Trump tide but to build a new paradigm for decades to come. A lot of good things fall out of that perspective. I'm thinking now that I should dial back the ambition from book to essay length, crank out the essay, try to get it published somewhere respectable, and see if there's any further demand. But along the way, I thought of how either of you might help, then came up with something slightly different. That is to look at the Reagan-to-Trump era reactionary movement in the broader context of fascist movements around the world. Also, to lessen my load, and give this a better chance of actually happening, I propose that you two do it as a graphic book (Mike writing, Ram illustrating). Maybe I can contribute some rough ideas, a website, some online notes, like that.

The immediate trigger for the thought was reading Benjamin Carter Hett's "The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic." Some descriptions of Hitler can easily be recast for Trump. Some cannot, but the essential point is that both are public faces of crazed mass movements which were handed power by arch-conservative power brokers (the Kochs and Mercers as much as Hindenburg and his business backers), in both cases understanding that their privileges can only be sustained if they can hide behind a political movement preoccupied with hating others. It's taken some countries much longer to mount a successful fascist movement than others. Germany in the 1920s could look back on its humiliating defeat in the Great War and rail against both internal traitors and the insults of reparations, while imagining that the extraordinary will of someone like Hitler could triumph, restoring Germany's greatness among nations. Fascists could build on lesser grounds, as Mussolini did in Italy. Even in England and France, small groups felt cheated and spawned lesser fascist movements.

It was even harder to get a fascist movement started in the US, but in the 1930s there was a clique of conservatives who harbored the fantasy, and they started to build as the Cold War lent their anti-union politics an air of respectability. As Robert Paxton argues in "The Anatomy of Fascism," fascists start out as the public face of oligarchic powers frustrated by having to deal with democracy. That turns out to be a pretty apt description of Trump. And it's worth noting that GW Bush made his own fortune working as the front man for the oil magnates who owned the Texas Rangers. Also that as Reagan's acting career washed up, he made his living as a shill for General Electric (see Kim Phillips-Fein's "Invisible Hands" for more on GE's hardcore opposition to FDR's New Deal). The difference between Hitler and America's leading fascists is that Hitler moved beyond being a front, seizing power and pursuing his own delusions, driving Germany to utter ruin, whereas the damage wrought by the American troika have yet to rebound against their masters.

Thinking along these lines, I was reminded of Marx's quip about Napoleon III in 1848: "history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce." That seems about right for contrasting Trump to Hitler and Mussolini, although one might not want to tempt fate given that the full bill for electing Trump has yet to be paid. Also one doesn't want to make light of the many terrible things that Trump as already done. Still, I see no reason why we can't present him as a buffoon as well as vile. Indeed, that's likely to be where the graphic form is most effective. Nor should we refrain from treating Hitler and Mussolini as farcical characters. Maybe if people had realized then how ridiculous they were, they might have been stopped before they could devastate so much of the world. Stopping Trump is still an option.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, April archive.

Music: current count 31440 [31400] rated (+40), 255 [256] unrated (-1).

Last Monday of the month, so time to unveil April Streamnotes, including this week's subset below. Five Mondays this month, so the totals are up handsomely from the two previous four-Monday months. Weekly rated count is up a bit, but that's partly because I found five records I failed to record grades for recently. Some of those bookkeeping errors probably caused me to log 29-album weeks (four so far this year) instead of 30, long my standard for a productive week.

Worth noting that all three of this week's new non-jazz A-list albums here also placed high on Phil Overeem's latest list (numbers 4, 6, and 20). For what little it's worth, I wrote those before seeing Overeem's list, but not before Dan Weiss praised them on Facebook (although I think I first heard of Billie Eilish from Christgau).

Those tips help make up for the frustration of declining awareness I've been feeling. Although I still keep a music tracking file, I've stopped making any systematic effort to find and list prospects, leaving me with little concept of what to search out next. As a result, I veer off on arbitrary tangents, as when I found a piece called A Guide to Drexciya's Futuristic Electro. I really liked Drexciya's Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller, Vol. I back in 2012, so that seemed worth pursuing. But it certainly fell far short of a plan.

Finally, a link that makes more sense to list here than in yesterday's Weekend Roundup: Rachel Syme: Vince Aletti's Obsessive Collection of Seminal Fashion Magazinse. Vince was one of the first people I met when I moved to New York City in 1977, so it's good to see him again, even older, as we all are.

New records reviewed this week:

• Kevin Abstract: Arizona Baby (2019, Question Everything/RCA): [r]: B+(**)
• Juan Álamo & Marimjazzia: Ruta Panoramica (2016 [2019], Summit): [cd]: B+(**)
• Anderson .Paak: Ventura (2019, Aftermath/12 Tone Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Brittany Anjou: Enamigo Reciprokataj (2015-16 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Seamus Blake: Guardians of the Heart Machine (2017 [2019], Whirlwind): [r]: B+(***)
• Club D'Elf: Night Sparkles (Live) (2011 [2019], Face Pelt): [r]: B+(***)
• Control Top: Covert Contracts (2019, Get Better): [r]: A-
• Cooper Moore/Stephen Gauci: Studio Sessions Vol. 1 (2019, Gaucimusic): [bc]: B+(***)
• Ronnie Cuber: Straight Street (2010 [2019], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• Billy Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019, Darkroom/Interscope): [r]: A-
• Anat Fort Trio: Colour (2019, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(**)
• Four: There You Go Thinking Again (2018 [2019], Jazz Hang): [cd]: B
• Bill Frisell/Thomas Morgan: Epistrophy (2016 [2019], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Stephen Gauci/Sandy Ewan/Adam Lane/Kevin Shea: Live at the Bushwick Series (2019, Gaucimusic): [bc]: B+(*)
• Lizzo: Cuz I Love You (2019, Nice Life/Atlantic): [r]: A-
• Lisa Maxwell's Jazz Orchestra: Shiny! (2018 [2019], Uncle Marvin Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Bennett Paster: Indivisible (2018 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Andrew Rathbun: Character Study (2017 [2018], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Eric Reed: Everybody Gets the Blues (2019, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(**)
• Steph Richards: Take the Neon Lights (2019, Birdwatcher): [r]: B+(***)
• Dave Scott: In Search of Hipness (2018 [2019], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(*)
• Swindle: No More Normal (2019, Brownswood): [r]: B-
• Trapper Keaper: Meets Tim Berne & Aurora Nealand (2019, Ears & Eyes/Caligola): [cd]: B+(***)
• Cory Weeds Quintet: Live at Frankie's Jazz Club (2019, Cellar Live): [r]: B+(*)
• Walt Weiskopf European Quartet: Worldwide (2019, Orenda): [cd]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Afro-Blue Persuasion: Live at Haight Levels: Volume One (1967 [2019], Tramp): [r]: B+(**)
• Afro-Blue Persuasion: Live at Haight Levels: Volume Two (1967 [2019], Tramp): [r]: B+(**)
• Elecktrokids: Elektroworld (1995 [2019], Clone Classic Cuts): [bc]: B+(**)
• Mark Turner/Gary Foster: Mark Turner Meets Gary Foster (2003 [2019], Capri, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Bill Cunliffe/Gary Foster: It's About Love (2003, Torii): [r]: B+(***)
• Drexciya: Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller III (1992-97 [2013], Clone Classic Cuts): [bc]: A-
• Drexciya: Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller IV (1992-97 [2013], Clone Classic Cubs): [bc]: B+(***)
• Drexciya: Neptune's Lair (1999, Tresor): [r]: B+(***)
• Drexciya: Grava 4 (2002, Clone): [r]: B+(**)
• Billie Eilish: Don't Smile at Me (2017, Darkroom/Interscope, EP): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Greg Abate with the Tim Ray Trio: Gratitude: Stage Door Live @ The Z (Whaling City Sound)
• Brittany Anjou: Enamigo Reciprokataj (Origin)
• Rebecca DuMaine and the Dave Miller Combo: Chez Nous (Summit): June 7
• Satoko Fujii: Stone (Libra): June 7
• The Invisible Party: Shumankind (Chant -18)
• Peter Jensen & DR Big Band: Stand on Your Feet and Fight: Voices of the Danish West Indies (ILK)
• Ellynne Rey: The Birdsong Project (self-released): May 1
• Rent Romus' Life's Blood Ensemble: Side Three: New Work (Edgetone)
• The Richard Shulman Trio: Waltzing out of Town (RichHeart Music): May 11
• Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet: The Rhythm of Invention (Patois): June 7
• Walt Weiskopf European Quartet: Worldwide (Orenda): May 3

Purchases:

• Cardi B: Invasion of Privacy (2018 [2019], Atlantic) [A-]
• Todd Snider: Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3 (2019, Aimless) [A-]

Weekend Roundup

Started early and still running late. Having recently read Benjamin Carter Hett's The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, I woke up this morning with the idea of writing something about Trump, Republicans, and Fascism for today's introduction. Never got close to that. Hett's book is pretty straight history, but you can find a page here or there where you could easily gloss in Trump's name for Hitler's. Then you move onto other pages where Trump fails any comparison, usually by being too dumb or too lazy. There are also big differences between the Nazis and the Republicans, although differences on race, foreigners, unions, and military muscle are insignificant. The biggest one is that the Nazis actually had their own goon squad that could go out and physically attack their suspected enemies, whereas Republicans only wish they could do that. Still, the key point about Germany in 1932 was supposedly sober conservatives were so desperate to squash the left -- indeed, any trace of popular government, of democracy -- that they were willing to hand power over to a psycho like Hitler and his vicious gang of followers. Republicans seem happy to do the same thing here in America, for the same reasons, and with the same obliviousness to consequences.

I should note somewhere that former Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) died last week. Back in the 1980s he was the model of how a Republican politician could straddle moderate urban politics (he was mayor of Indianapolis) and the Reagan reaction, which for a time helped make the latter seem more innocuous and palatable. He was finally devoured by the right, purged in a primary by an opponent so extreme that the Democrats were able to (temporarily) pick up the seat. I never felt any particular fondness for Lugar, but I could understand why people respected him. Even his breed of Republican is now a thing of the past.

Also noted that historian David Brion Davis has died. His 1967 book The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture greatly affected the way pretty much everyone understood the history of slavery in the Americas. I've often thought I should check out his later books, especially the ones that extended his study into the 19th century. I learned of his death from a cranky Corey Robin note, which I decided not to bother with below. Here's a more useful (and generous) obituary.

Anyhow, this is what the week has to show for itself:

• Greg Asner: To solve climate change and biodiversity loss, we need a Global Deal for Nature.

• Nicholson Baker: My brain on cable news: "Tuning into TV's battle to the death."

  What's actually on cable these days is a bizarre legalistic death battle. Cohen, Manafort, Flynn, Butina, Mueller, Giuliani, et al. We aren't debating whether Trump has been responsible for the deaths of innocents, because everyone knows that he is -- presidents and collateral damage go hand in hand. If Trump goes to prison, it will not be for child murder, but for distributing hush money to silence former mistresses and for taking bribes and for engaging in back channel machinations with Russia. Whatever it takes, I suppose, but I have to agree with my cable guy: there's something unseemly about the means employed.

  Fox News is addictive and awful: choirboys gone to seed and women's dresses with weird portholes at the shoulders or at the cleavage. The anchors jeer smilingly at ideas that any sensible person of generous mind can see make sense. Quick clips of closed-circuit footage of humans with darker skin doing bad things are injected into the river of commentary -- mug shots included -- to create little mental firecracker pops of righteous wrath among the pickup-truck crowd, along with "funny" attacks on progressive causes by rightist comedians who love steak and country music. Fox & Friends is a hot mess of clean living and white-right American self-deception, and I can't watch it for very long without feeling queasy. But it's an easy mark.

• Jane Coaston: Trump's new defense of his Charlottesville comments is incredibly false. Related: Allegra Kirkland: Whitewash: Trump takes new approach to sanitizing Charlottesville protests.

• Helena Cobban: The UAE's seedy influence operations are a footnote to the Mueller report.

• Bryce Covert: Hedge-fund ownership cost Sears workers their jobs. Now they're fighting back. Seems like lots (damn near all of ) the companies you read about in bankruptcy first passed through a phase where private equity operators first bought the company with its own debt than stripped assets and paid themselves "management fees." Maybe if they were lucky they'd be able to sell the carcass off, but current bankruptcy law favors creditors over employees and customers, finishing the liquidation while leaving the public worse off. Our think tanks need to think about this situation, and come up with new bankruptcy laws that allow companies to survive such malign ownership, preferably under employee ownership, with debt loads reduced to levels which allow the companies to carry on. Other regulations could help, but just changing bankruptcy law would shift the incentives dramatically.

• Alex Emmons: Coalition airstrikes in Raqqa killed at least 1,600 civilians, more than 10 times US tally, report finds.

• Tom Engelhardt: Publisher and introduction writer at TomDispatch:

  • Collusion, hell, yeah!: "Suicide watch on planet Earth: as the flames began to rise, the arsonists appeared."

  • A "ridiculous" war: "American war is off the charts: how the US military feeds at the terror trough."

  • Allegra Harpootlian/Emily Manna: The AI Wars: "The end of war is just a beginning. Will technology stamp a 'forever' on America's wars?"

  • Jen Marlowe: Running for the Right to Thrive: "The Palestinian marathon: a window into occupation and survival in a less than holy land."

  • Nick Turse: No need to whisper, AFRICOM isn't listening in: "AFRICOM calls for my 'elimination' (from their daily media reports)."

  • Belle Chesler: Defunding children, a national crisis of the soul: "Making American schools less great again: a lesson in educational nihilism on a grand scale."

  • Arnold R Isaacs: The 100-year-old echoes of 2019: "Looking back at 1919: immigration, race, and women's rights, then and now."

  • Ann Jones: Our Veblen moment: "The man who saw Trump coming a century ago: a reader's guide for the distraught."

  • Alfred McCoy: America's self-inflicted wound: "Decriminalizing the drug war? Calculating the damage from a century of drug prohibition."

• Todd Gitlin: The roots of Trumpian agitprop: Hint: article namechecks Leni Riefenstahl, as well as Susan Sontag writing about Riefenstahl.

• Patrick Greenfield: Spain election: socialist party PSOE declared winner: live update blog; PSOE is expected to be able to form a coalition with the further leftist party Podemos; the far-right party Vox surged, but only wound up with 24 MPs (6.8%), at the expense of more mainstream conservatives (PP is down from 137 to 66).

• Sue Halpern: The terrifying potential of the 5G network: "The future of wireless technology holds the promise of total connectivity. But it will also be especially susceptible to cyberattacks and surveillance." Guess who else is selling snooping gear? Richard Silverstein: Israel and the selling of the surveillance state.

• Murtaza Hussain: Our enemies are the same people: San Diego synagogue shooter inspired by New Zealand anti-Muslim massacre.

• Sean Illing: White identity politics is about more than racism: Interview with Ashley Jardina, author of White Identity Politics..

• Christopher Ingraham: Rich guys are most likely to have no idea what they're talking about, study suggests.

• Greg Jaffe: Capitalism in crisis: US billionaires worry about the survival of the system that made them rich.

• Sam Knight: The uncanny power of Greta Thunberg's climate-change rhetoric.

  The climate-change movement feels powerful today because it is politicians -- not the people gluing themselves to trucks -- who seem deluded about reality. Thunberg says that all she wants is for adults to behave like adults, and to act on the terrifying information that is all around us.

  Related: Stewart Lee: Why Greta Thunberg is now my go-to girl.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Armpits, white ghettos and contempt: "Who really despises the American heartland?" Opens with a sidebar on Stephen Moore (Trump's Fed pick), noting:

    Moore is an indefensible choice on many grounds. Even if he hadn't shown himself to be extraordinarily misogynistic and have an ugly personal history, his track record on economics -- always wrong, never admitting error or learning from it -- is utterly disqualifying.

  • Survival of the wrongest: "Evidence has a well-known liberal bias." Much more on Stephen Moore.

  • The great Republican abdication: "A party that no longer believes in American values." Wait! Aren't greed, hubris, and desperate schemes to rig every contest the ultimate American values? Those are clearly the hallmarks of the recent Republican Party, and those are traits one can question and denounce. But calling them un-American misses a big part of their appeal.

• Bill McKibben: To stop global catastrophe, we must believe in humans again: "We have the technology to prevent climate crisis. But now we need to unleash mass resistance too -- because collective action does work." Edited extract from his new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?. He also pleaded for mass resistance recently in Glaciers and Arctic ice are vanishing. Time to get radical before it's too late.

• Paul Mozur/Jonah M Kessel/Melissa Chan: Made in China, exported to the world: the surveillance state.

• Anna North: Trump's Fed pick wrote that women should be banned from March Madness: Well, actually he's written and said a lot of stupid things, not least on matters more germane to his appointment -- not that whether he's an asshole is irrelevant. As for Trump's other pick of a political hack for a Fed seat, see: Li Zhou: It's official: Herman Cain is not going to be on the Fed. Zhou also wrote: Young voters want more action on climate change -- even if it hurts the economy.

• Gabby Orr/Andrew Restuccia: How Stephen Miller made immigration personal.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • How to get away with obstructing justice.

  • What Donald Trump actually did in 2016, according to the Mueller report.

• Ben Protess/William K Rashbaum/Maggie Haberman: How Michael Cohen turned against President Trump.

• Eric Rauchway: Obama's original sin: "A new insider account reveals how the Obamas administration's botched bailout deal not only reinforced neoliberal Clintonism, but also foreshadowed an ongoing failure to fulfill campaign promises." Review of Reed Hundt: A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining Decisions. Reminds me that perhaps the first of those decisions was letting Clinton factotum John Podesta run the transition team, which initially penciled in such pivotal figures as Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers.

• Gabriela Resto-Montero: Most Americans believe Trump lied to them, but think impeachment is a bad idea. Related: Ella Nilsen: Democrats' impeachment dilemma, explained.

• James Risen: Unanswered questions in the Mueller report point to a sprawling Russian spy game.

• David Roberts:

  • Don't bother waiting for conservatives to come around on climate change. One sample quote:

    We know that personality traits can be pretty deeply embedded by early childhood, but we also know that which traits and dispositions are brought to the fore, individually and collectively, depends on circumstances. Crudely speaking, when people feel safe and cared for, they will be more open to extending the circle of care (that is, more liberal). When they feel anxious or threatened, they will be more inclined to draw the circle of care inward, i.e., to become more conservative.

    Right-wing media is a machine for scaring older white people -- i.e., for making them more conservative. A whole generation of young people has lost parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles to the Fox machine. It has dragged the political center to the right and slowed progressive reforms (like universal health care) that have been in place in other developed democracies for years. It will fight climate progress to its last breath.

  • Fox News has united the right against the Green New Deal. The left remains divided.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • "This was a coup": Trump escalates his authoritarian rhetoric. Trump goes on: "This was an attempted overthrow of the United States government." The unstated premise to that could only be, "L'état, c'est moi." Actually, the Mueller investigation was launched by Trump's own administration to rescue Trump from the appearance of having obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James Comey, whose job involved investigating the lies and possible corruption of several Trump appointees, notably Michael Flynn.

  • Why Trump's tweets about Don McGahn and the Mueller report could backfire.

  • Trump's tweets are getting more unhinged.

  • Polling shows Fox News has been amazingly effective at shaping opinion on the Mueller report. Self self-selection as well: Fox viewers think that Mueller's report exonerates Trump by a 83-10 margin; MSNBC viewers break even harder the other direction, 7-90, while CNN is a bit less extreme, 17-71.

• Darren Samuelsohn/Andrew Desiderio/Kyle Cheney: 'This is risky': Trump's thirst for Mueller revenge could land him in trouble. Related: Andrew Restuccia: Mueller report exposes diminishing power of Trump denials: "The report has reignited a media debate about how seriously to take the White House's statements of fact."

• Eric Schmitt/David E Sanger/Maggie Haberman: In push for 2020 election security, top official was warned: don't tell Trump.

• Ben Schwartz: The trigger presidency: "How shock jock comedy gave way to Donald Trump's Republican Party.

• Dylan Scott: Trump's high-stakes subpoena battle with House Democrats, explained.

• Matt Shuham: Trump lets loose stunning falsehood that doctors, mothers 'execute' babies.

• Ben Taub:

  • How the War on Terror is being written: Starts on Guantánamo, ends with a long list of links to source documents. Midway, Taub notes:

    The year after [James] Mitchell published his memoir [Enhanced Interrogation], it was cited in a lengthy report by Physicians for Human Rights, which argues that the interrogation program represented "one of the gravest breaches of medical ethics" since the Nazi medical experiments during the Second World War.

    These documents -- along with contemporaneous reports and books by investigative journalists, academics, lawyers, and human-rights advocates -- make up an evolving draft of post-9/11 history. With each passing year, more details surface in memoirs, lawsuits, and military commissions, and the historical record comes into sharper focus. Millions of pages have come to light, and millions more remain classified. But, seventeen years into the war on terror, a core, uncomfortable fact remains: people on the receiving end of classified security programs -- from drone strikes to renditions and interrogations -- become aware of the outlines of secret U.S. national-security laws and practices long before American citizens have any clarity or say about what is being done in their name.

  • Guantánamo's darkest secret.

• Murray Waas: Mueller prosecutors: Trump did obstruct justice.

• Alex Ward:

  • Democrats want to challenge Trump's foreign policy in 2020. They're still working out how. Surprisingly little here, or maybe not given how readily Democrats have lined up behind the common consensus policies in place since shortly after WWII. Consider "the four main pillars of a progressive foreign policy (so far)":

    1. Confront climate change
    2. Democracy promotion and anti-corruption
    3. Strengthening alliances
    4. Rebuilding America

    I would have started off with negotiated demilitarization: securing treaties all around the world that resolve conflicts and reduce the military posture of all nations (especially the US). My second point would be to expand "democracy promotion and anti-corruption" to lean left, to support more power for workers and for women, while accepting that capital rights need to be limited and regulated. On trade, I'd work to limit (or in many cases eliminate) rents based on intellectual property. This in turn should lead to greater sharing of best practices in science and technology, which would help with problems like climate change, loss of biodiversity, etc. I'd also like to see some sort of international framework for dealing with migration. Democrats have done a miserable job of formulating foreign policy due to the old colonial mentality where they've never seen the rest of the world's peoples as our equals, and never recognized that our welfare is co-dependent on the world's. Another piece on trying to change Democratic strategy: David Klion: When will Washington end the Forever War?.

  • Sri Lanka suffered from decades of violence before the Easter Sunday bombings. Related: Samanth Subramanian: After the Easter bombings, Sri Lanka grapples with its history of violence.

• Robin Wright:

  • Trump's strange, tense campaign against Iran.

  • ISIS still has global reach, despite the Caliphate's collapse.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • We're not hearing enough from 2020 candidates about things they could do as president.

  • Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020: "Americans want outsiders, reformers, and fresh faces, not politicians with decades of baggage." Pretty much all you need to know about Biden in 2020, but not the only thing written this week. E.g.:

    • Moira Donegan: Anita Hill deserves a real apology. Why couldn't Joe Biden offer one?

    • Jill Filipovic: Joe Biden's policies are as troubling as his inappropriate touching.

    • German Lopez: Joe Biden's long record supporting the war on drugs and mass incarceration, explained.

    • Arwa Mahdawi: Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 -- and it won't end well this time either.

    • Jane Mayer: What Joe Biden hasn't owned up to about Anita Hill.

    • Jim Newell: The 2020 candidates smell blood: "The reason so many Democrats are running is they think Biden won't survive."

      The field in 2016 was so small not because politicians with national aspirations didn't exist, but because they thought Clinton -- with her name recognition, financial resources, party relationships, high early polling numbers, and general next-in-line aura -- was inevitable. She cleared the field of most competition because other mainstream candidates knew she would win (and non-mainstream Bernie figured she would too).

      Biden is something more like a 2016 Jeb Bush: a weak establishment favorite whose time might be past and -- should voters deprioritize his top perceived strength, electability -- who could soon face the wolves.

      Newell also wrote: Biden has successfullyl goaded Trump, which is exactly what he needs to do. One thing many Democrats will be looking for in primary season is the candidate who most effectively articulates their rage over Trump, and one of the best ways to do that is to get under his thin skin.

    • Nate Silver: How Joe Biden could win the 2020 Democratic Primary: Put a lot of weight on his initial poll lead, and hope nothing goes wrong.

    • Matt Taibbi: Is Joe Biden 'electable' or not? Thank God, nobody seems to know.

  • The Democratic establishment should chill out about Bernie Sanders.

    As Sanders continues to rate highly in national polls, many longtime party stalwarts are palpably agitated over a blend of personal grievances and overblown political and policy concerns. . . .

    As a personal matter, the establishment's response is understandable. Sanders, an independent Vermont senator, tends to portray the institutional Democratic Party as corrupt and relentlessly sows suspicion about the motives and integrity of everyone who disagrees with him. He treats the catastrophe of the 2016 election as a deserved rebuke to party leaders. And he brushes aside mountains of practical realities that others have spent years dealing with.

    But blowing up over this makes no sense. The whole point of a party establishment is to be cynical, detached, practical-minded, and realistic. If they assess Sanders's actual track record -- rather than his personally insulting rhetoric -- they'd discover a fairly unremarkable blue-state liberal who's good at winning elections and has extensive experience with the disappointing realities of the legislative process.

    Relevant here: Peter Daou: I was Bernie's biggest critic in 2016 -- I've changed my mind: "It would be an epic act of self-destruction for Democrats to try to hobble his campaign." Let's see if I can explain this in simple terms. During the Reagan-to-Trump era, Democrats have been preoccupied with raising money (cultivating donor support). Some, like Obama and the Clintons, have even done a good job of this, largely by promising that they'd do an even better job for business than the Republicans would -- something the stats clearly support. Meanwhile, the Democrats have let their base go to hell, and found their support eroding, even as Republicans have even less to offer. What Sanders is doing is rebuilding the Democratic Party base, by appealing to the people Democrats have been screwing for decades now. Attacking Sanders risks driving this base away, if not to the Republicans then to a third party or nothing. Sanders is doing the party a huge favor by not running as an independent. The party needs to reciprocate by welcoming him and his voters. They might even find, like Daou, that they'll learn something.

• Gary Younge: Brexit is not just a tragedy for Britain.

Daily Log

Fixed dinner for four last night. Wasn't planned, except iasmuch as I bought a pound of hamburger thinking I'd make meatloaf, then postponed it after my wife stuck the meat in the freezer. I already had a pound of ground lamb there, and keep everything else I would need as staples. So when I announced I'd fix it Friday, my wife invited a couple of friends over. I don't normally make any extra dishes for just the two of us -- the meatloaf baked with some root vegetables, so makes a nice comforty meal-for-two, with leftovers for sandwiches. But with two more guests, I figured I should add a little something. I decided to limit myself to things I could fix without shopping. Came up with this:

• Meatloaf (beef + lamb, with onion, green bell pepper, garlic, a can of tomatoes, two eggs, parmesan cheese, some spices) with coarsely chopped root vegetables (yukon potatoes, parsnip, a sweet potato).
• Baked beans topped with bacon (two cans of Van Camps, flavored with mustard, catsup, worcestshire, brown sugar, maple syrup, also threw in a bit of Chinese bean sauce).
• Cut green beans (a frozen bag), microwaved and added to a skillet with butter, shallots (two chopped), ham (two slices, diced fine), roasted garlic, a chopped scallion, sliced almonds, and a splash of sesame oil. (Thought about adding parmesan, but don't think I did.)
• Roaster butternut squash soup.
• Chocolate mousse for dessert.

I made the soup several days before. I thought it was pretty tasty, but I mostly make soups for Laura, and she didn't seem much interested in it. The other choices were mostly dictated by trying to get rid of things from the freezer and the pantry. I first tried another bag of cut green beans, but after I screwed up and boiled the pot dry, I decided they weren't worth saving, and grabbed another bag. The canned beans were old too: we threw out several ancient cans last week, so that got me thinking I should use what I had left. The bacon was OK, but running out of time. I meant to include carrots, but had to throw the few I had out (as well as most of the rest of the produce drawer).

The first two were old family recipes (the beans from my first wife) that I had fiddled with over the years. The green beans was pure improv. Earlier I had the idea of making creamed corn, but gave that up when I only found small packages of corn in the freezer. (The recipe, of course, frowned on using frozen corn, but I think I've used it before.) The cream got me to thinking about chocolate mousse, as one of the few really good desserts I could whip up in just a few minutes.

The chocolate mousse was a last-minute idea, started just before the guests arrived. I had several opened packages of chocolate in the fridge, and found 4 oz. of 70% bittersweet there. I had a guest whisk the melted chocolate/butter and egg yolks, and they wound up lumpy. I didn't pay enough attention to whipping either the egg yolks or the cream, and both came out less airy than ideal. The result was kind of lumpy and soupy, although the taste was there. It's just that you had to chew it to break the lumps open, but that turned out to be surprisingly satisfying.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, April archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31400 [31371] rated (+29), 256 [252] unrated (+4).

Seems like pretty much everything is a struggle these days. My most common complaint is that I'm getting sick and tired of not being able to do things right. A typical example was trying to repair a screen door lock. A nylon washer disappeared, and has proven impossible to replace. I bought some things I thought I might be able to use, then lost them. Bought some more, and turned out they were too thick, and hole was too small. I tried drilling out the hole, and destroyed the washer. Finally reassembled the door handle without the washer. The set screw is hard to get a grip on. It will no doubt fall apart again in a matter of days, at best a couple weeks. I have a bunch of other things that are falling apart, many because I didn't do a good enough job building them in the first place.

On the other hand, I have gotten a few things done. The new pantry shelf unit is painted and bolted in place, although we haven't really put it to use yet. That's waiting a second pantry improvement. I built a rather neat storage unit, then screwed up hanging the door so it never closed correctly (or at least easily). It finally dawned on me that if I could shave a quarter inch off the bottom surface, it should close without having to change the hinges. All that's left to do there is to rehang the door, and see whether the theory worked. Tomorrow.

At least I finally got my computers moved, making my workspace much more comfortable. Still haven't done the next step, which is to set up virtual web servers on the secondary machine, so I can start redesigning the Robert Christgau and Carola Dibbell websites. I should at least know what I'm doing there.

Meanwhile, another routine week of music discoveries. Hard part for me is deciding what to search out. This seems like a typical week with two weeks of Christgau picks, further search down Phil Overeem's list, and the first Michael Tatum Downloader's Diary in quite a while. Unfortunately, I found myself coming up short with their well-considered picks. Instead, I went with the new Chemical Brothers album (I think someone on the Expert Witness Facebook group raved about it, but don't recall who), and a 1979 jazz album reissue that probably showed up in a Bandcamp Daily list (which I started using a couple weeks back when I couldn't play Napster).

Also, two rare regrades to from B+(***) to A-, originally reviewed by streaming but given a few more changes after CDs arrived. People shouldn't get the idea that all they have to do to get higher grades is to send me CDs, but they do help in cases where I've held a grade back due to some minor reservations.

April Streamnotes should be released with next Music Week, on April 29. Currently have 113 records in the draft file, so I'll probably wind up with 140-150.

New records reviewed this week:

• Art Ensemble of Chicago: We Are on the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration (2018 [2019], Pi, 2CD): [cd]: B+(**)
• The Chemical Brothers: No Geography (2019, Virgin EMI): [r]: A-
• Martin Frawley: Undone at 31 (2019, Merge): [r]: B+(***)
• Ahmed Ag Kaedy: Akaline Kidal (2019, Sahel Sounds): [r]: B+(**)
• Salif Keita: Un Autre Blanc (2018 [2019], Naive): [r]: B+(***)
• Khalid: Suncity (2018, RCA, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Khalid: Free Spirit (2019, RCA): [r]: B+(***)
• Larry Koonse: New Jazz Standards Vol. 4 (2019, Summit): [cd]: B
• Joachim Kühn: Melodic Ornette Coleman: Piano Works XIII (2018 [2019], ACT): [r]: B+(*)
• Russ Lossing: Changes (2018 [2019], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• Russ Lossing: Motian Music (2019, Sunnyside): [r]: B+(**)
• Reba McEntire: Stronger Than the Truth (2019, Big Machine): [r]: B+(*)
• Sam Ospovat: Ride Angles (2018 [2019], Skirl): [cd]: B+(**)
• Hama Sankare: Ballébé: Calling All Africans (2018, Clermont Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Hama Sankare: Niafunke (2019, Clermont Music): [r]: B+(***)
• Silk Road Assassins: State of Ruin (2019, Planet Mu): [r]: B+(*)
• Marcos Silva: Brasil: From Head to Toe (2019, Green Egg): [cd]: B
• Solange: When I Get Home (2019, Saint/Columbia): [r]: B+(*)
• Spellling: Mazy Fly (2019, Sacred Bones): [r]: B+(**)
• Sunflower Bean: King of the Dudes (2019, Mom + Pop, EP): [r]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Infinite Spirit Music: Live Without Fear (1979 [2019], Jazzman): [r]: A-
• Live at Raul's (1979 [2019], Steady Boy): [r]: B+(*)
• Onda De Amor: Synthesized Brazilian Hits That Never Were (1984-94) (1984-94 [2018], Soundway): [bc]: B+(**)
• Weaponize Your Sound (2019, Optimo Music): [bc]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Salif Keita: The Mansa of Mali: A Retrospective (1978-94 [1994], Mango): [r]: B+(***)
• Russ Lossing: Dreamer (2000, Double Time): [r]: B+(**)
• Russ Lossing/Ed Schuller/Paul Motian: As It Grows (2002 [2004], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Russ Lossing: All Things Arise (2005 [2006], Hatology): [r]: B+(**)
• Timosaurus: I Love You More Than Yesterday (2011, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Hiljaisuus: Kuzu (2017 [2019], Astral Spirits/Aerophonic): [cd]: was: B+(***) A-
• Matthew Shipp Trio: Signature (2018 [2019], ESP-Disk): [cd]: was B+(***) A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• The Campfire Flies: Sparks Like Litle Stars (OverPop Music)
• Mark Dresser Seven: Ain't Nothing but a Cyber Coup & You (Clean Feed): May 10
• Four: There You Go Thinking Again (Jazz Hang)
• Bennett Paster: Indivisible (self-released): May 3
• Trapper Keeper: Meets Tim Berne & Aurora Nealand (Ears & Eyes)
• Mark Turner/Gary Foster: Mark Turner Meets Gary Foster (Capri): May 17
• The United States Air Force Band: The Jazz Heritage Series: 2019 Radio Broadcasts (self-released)

Weekend Roundup

Let's start off with a range of reactions to the release (with extensive redactions) of the final report of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller:

• Alex Ward: The Mueller report, explained in 500 words: Fair to start with this executive summary of the report itself, but this falls far short of its intent ("everything you wanted to know . . . but detailed as briefly as possible"), mostly by not examining the context or process. One thing I've long wondered about was to what extent low-level operatives in Trump's (and his PAC allies') cyber operations were aware of let alone had contacts with the Russian operatives who worked on Trump's behalf. Even if they didn't explicitly coordinate, they very likely built on and reinforced each other's work. Mueller seems to have taken a top-down approach, looking at a few suspicious meetings, but it's not clear that he did any investigation of the campaign staff most competent to actually collude (not just with the Russians but with other foreign or nominally independent organizations). Mueller may have had narrow legal reasons for limiting his focus, but it would have been helpful to spell them out. One big problem with the American political system is that a lot of what campaigns -- both raising money and spending it -- do may not technically be illegal but stikes me (and probably most people) as profoundly corrupt.

• Scott R Anderson, et al. (long list of contributors at Lawfare): What Mueller found on Russia and on obstruction: a first analysis. Also at Lawfare:

  • Quinta Jurecic: Obstruction of justice in the Mueller report: a heat map.

  • Samuel Moyn: The Mueller report is a challenge for democracy to solve.

  • Alina Polyakova: What the Mueller report tells us about Russian influence operations.

  • Paul Rosenzweig: Some questions for Attorney General Barr.

  • Benjamin Wittes: Notes on reading the Mueller report: a reading diary.

• Anne Applebaum: Why was Trump so afraid of the Mueller investigation? We may never know. Indeed. Maybe, as the author implies, he had things to hide that Mueller didn't uncover. Maybe he just couldn't stand the pressure of being picked apart by investigators whose ambitions and/or biases could result in him being framed? Trump knows as well as anyone how the system can be rigged. The only thing you can be sure of is that Trump's word on what happened is worthless.

• Bill Blum: Five critical takeaways from the Mueller report.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • The Mueller report's collusion section is much worse than you think: "The contacts with Russians documented in the report amount to a devastating indictment of Trump's approach to politics."

  • The attorney general just pre-spun the Mueller report for Trump.

• Ryan Bort: Trump will be attacking the 'Crazy Mueller Report' for the rest of his life.

• Alvin Chang/Javier Zarracina: The Mueller report redactions, explaind in 4 charts: Total redacted content: 7.25%. Most heavily redacted were Russian "Active Measures" Social Media Campaign (46%), Russian Hacking (23%), and Prosecution and Declination Decisions (31%).

• Isaac Chotiner: Neal Katyal on whether the Mueller report went far enough: Interview with a law professor who helped "draft the special-counsel regulations" after Ken Starr's protracted effort to crucify Bill Clinton. Katyal says:

  I would say three people's colors have been revealed by this report. We have learned Mueller's reputation is real. We have learned Trump's disregard for the truth and the rule of law is real. And we have learned Barr has become a total Trumpian Attorney General.

• Jane Coaston: The Seth Rich conspiracy theory needs to end now: "The Mueller report confirms that the late DNC staffer had absolutely nothing to do with leaked emails later shared by WikiLeaks."

• George T Conway III: Trump is a cancer on the presidency. Congress should remove him.

• EJ Dionne Jr: Mueller's report is the beginning, not the end.

• Masha Gessen: The hustlers and swindlers of the Mueller report.

• Susan B Glasser: The Mueller report won't end Trump's presidency, but it sure makes him look bad.

• Glenn Greenwald: Robert Mueller did not merely reject the Trump-Russia conspiracy theories. He obliterated them.

• Katie Halper: 9 ways the media blew it in its 'Russiagate' coverage.

• Sean Illing: Does the Mueller report exonerate Trump? I asked 12 legal experts.

• Jen Kirby: Confused about who's who in the Mueller report? Start here.

• Ezra Klein:

  • The best defense of Trump is still a damning indictment: "The Mueller report's defense of Trump: exculpatory incompetence, misplaced rage."

  • The problem with impeachment. Despite the nesting, let's put the impeachment eggs in this one basket:

    • Yoni Appelbaum: The Mueller report is an impeachment referral.

    • Max Boot: The Mueller report reads like an impeachment referral, and To impeach or not to impeach? That is now the question.

    • Jonathan Chait: Congress should impeach William Barr.

      This is probably as good a place as any to hang: Ryan Goodman: Barr's playbook: he misled Congress when omitting parts of Justice Dep't memo in 1989.

    • Donna F Edwards: Why impeachment is imperative.

    • Randall D Eliason: The Mueller report is not an impeachment referral.

    • Quinta Jurecic/Susan Hennessey: The Mueller report demands an impeachment inquiry.

    • Eric Levitz: If impeaching Trump is pointless, then bipartisanship is worthless.

    • Jennifer Rubin: Pelosi's right. Forget about impeachment. Unless . . . Republicans decide to make impeachment a bipartisan project.

    • Greg Sargent: Nancy Pelosi just blew it on impeachment. Here's how to get it right.

    • Karen Tumulty: Impeachment would be a terrible thing for our country. We have another option. She prefers that one (or both) chambers of Congress vote to censure Trump (as they last did Andrew Jackson).

    • John Yoo: It's now impeachment or bust. As it should be.

    I skipped over the stories of various politicians calling for impeachment (or not). I basically agree with Rubin (and Pelosi): as long as impeachment is a partisan divide, there's no way to do it, and trying detracts from other efforts to expose Trump. Still, it doesn't hurt to rattle that sword now and then, especially as its futility is really an indictment of the Republicans protecting Trump. In the long run, people need to think about better ways of limiting abuse of presidential power. I think it should be possible for Congress to overturn arbitrary Trump orders like his border emergency and Yemen War support, to pick two recent examples, without having to muster enough support to also override his veto -- especially given that we have an electoral system which lets someone win a 4-year term with as little support as Trump had in 2016.

• Dara Lind: 7 times the Mueller report caught Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders lying to press.

• Renato Mariotti: The obstruction case against Trump that Barr tried to hide.

• Jane Mayer: In the Mueller report, Erik Prince funds a covert effort to obtain Clinton's e-mails from a foreign state.

• Ella Nilsen: It's official: House Democrats subpoena the full, unredacted Mueller report.

• Andrew Prokop: The Mueller report's biggest mystery: "What did Mueller find out about Trump associates and email leaks?"

• James Risen/Robert Mackey/Trevor Aaronson: Annotating special counsel Robert Mueller's redacted report.

• Jennifer Rubin: Five questions that still need to be answered in the Mueller report.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Sarah Sanders keeps digging herself in deeper after Mueller showed she lied.

  • Trump liked the Mueller report when it looked good for him. Today he called it "total bullshit."

• Charlie Savage: How Barr's excerpts compare to the Mueller report's findings.

• Khushbu Shah: Mitt Romney is "sickened" by the Trump administration's "dishonesty" after reading Mueller report.

• Danny Sjursen: Liberals sold their souls to the war machine on Russia.

• Jennifer Taub: Don McGahn not listening to Donald Trump doesn't absolve the President of a crime.

• Peter Van Buren: Mueller's investigation is missing one thing: a crime:

  Almost everything Mueller has, the perjury and lying cases, are crimes he created through the process of investigating. He's Schrodinger's Box: the infractions only exist when he tries to look at them.

  On the other hand, a lot of things that aren't really prosecutable crimes look and smell bad. Politicians lie about them because they know this, and are trying to avoid exposing their faults.

I originally figured I'd try to write up my take on this, but at this point I'm too exhausted (not to mention disgusted).

Some scattered links this week:

• Peter Beinart: Nobody knows anything about 'electability': Article runs with Biden's picture up top, since pundits would much rather talk about his "electability" than his policy views or track record, but touches on others, noting that "they're making lots of dubious assumptions."

  All this glib talk about electability has a cost. It leads commentators, often implicitly, to give "electable" candidates a pass when their policy views are fuzzy or flat-out wrong. So what should journalists do? It's simple: Spend less time discussing which candidates can win the presidency and more time discussing what they'd do if they actually won.

• Jonathan Blitzer: The unlawful ambitions of Donald Trump's immigration policy.

• Lee Camp: Nearly 100,000 Pentagon whistleblower complaints have been silenced.

• Jane Coaston: Andrew Yang's plan to take on opioids: decriminalize heroin and fentanyl.

• Marjorie Cohn: America's coup efforts in Venezuela enter a frightening new phase.

• Coral Davenport: Interior Dept. opens ethics investigation of its new chief, David Bernhardt. That didn't take long, although few things could be less surprising.

• Karen DeYoung: Trump administration announces new measures against Cuba. Especially clever is the line about Cuba expanding "its malign influence and ideological imperialism across the region." Another example of the recent fashion of attacking the left by using the same language the left has traditionally used about the right. Also: Gregory Weeks: The US is thinking of invading Venezuela. That's unlikely to lead to democracy. And: Francisco Toro: Pompeo reaches the dead end of Trump's Venezuela policy, and With US military action, Venezuela could become the Libya of the Caribbean. Related: Alex Horton: Trump soured relations in Latin America. China and Russia have welcomed the chaos.

• Rob Evans: Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population. Next up: Peter Hetherington: So 1% of the people own half of England. Inheritance tax reform could fix that.

• Masha Gessen: The dangerous bullying of Ilhan Omar. Related: Ilhan Omar's deeply American message.

• Tara Golshan:

  • The logic of Bernie Sanders's continuing war against Clintonworld. Related: Adam Johnson: What if rich liberals just hate Bernie because they're rich? Also: Matt Taibbi: Bernie Sanders and the science of smears: "The media's focus on personality is designed to shift attention away from dangerous ideas."

  • Trump vetoes Congress's directive to end US involvement in bloody Saudi-led war in Yemen.

• Jen Kirby: An art historian explains the tough decisions in rebuilding Notre Dame.

• David D Kirkpatrick: Trump endorses an aspiring Libyan strongman, reversing policy. Maybe when he saw the memo he just misread the name (Khalifa Hifter)?

• Sarah Kliff: CBO: over 1 million Americans have become uninsured since 2016.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Bernie Sanders and the myth of the 1 percent.

  • Republicans are the real extremists.

• Dara Lind: Bernie Sanders's Fox News town hall wasn't a debate. Bernie won anyway.

• German Lopez: Marijuana legalization is very popular.

• Andrew Prokop: 7 winners from the first big presidential fundraising reports: After sections on Sanders, Harris, and Buttagieg: "Donald Trump is set to raise tons of cash while Democrats battle each other." No self-funding this time around. He's back to cash in.

• Sigal Samuel: The false choice between helping Notre Dame and helping poor people.

• Khushbu Shah: Republican strategist Karl Rove says Bernie Sanders could beat Trump in 2020: Much of this is based on Sanders' performance in facing a Fox-hosted town hall, warning his fellow right-wing activists that "beating Sanders by attacking his democratic socialist views 'won't be as easy as Republicans may think.'" Still, he's trying:

  However, the Republican strategist wasn't completely glowing in his analysis of the Democrat, arguing in his Wall Street Journal piece, "Such platitudes go only so far in masking what drives Mr. Sanders' philosophy: resentment, grievance, and a desire to take from those who have and redistribute the wealth, all to expand government. He may describe socialism in benign terms, but he regularly drops his guard, opening himself up to devastating counterpunches."

  I started to compile a list of recent right-wing books, noticing a trend of trying to paint Democrats as resentful, embittered, and vindictive -- traits that sure sound to me like the hate mongering that has bent the right-wing base so far out of shape and elected demagogues like Trump. Some examples, to give you a flavor of how desperate right-wing propagandists have become: Noah Rothman's Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America; Derek Hunter's Outrage, Inc.: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood, and Arthur C Brooks' Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt. Those titles (with minor tweaks) could easily have been used for books critiquing the right. That right-wingers have adopted them shows that they recognize that their credibility has worn out.

• Danny Sjursen:

  • Who are the real terrorists in the Mideast?

  • American history for Truthdiggers: Vietnam, a US tragedy: Number 29 in the author's series recapping American history, starting in 1607 with Original sin. I've always found this history interesting, both for what it tells us about where we came from, and why we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, but I've never felt like beating myself up over the sins of my ancestors. On the other hand, having grown up and lived through Vietnam, I feel no sympathy whatsoever for anyone who refuses to acknowledge that the American War in Vietnam was anything less than a colossal mistake. Still:

    It is the war that never dies. Vietnam, the very word shrouded with extraordinary meaning in the American lexicon. For some it represents failure; for others guilt; for still more, anger that the war could have and should have been won. Americans are still arguing about this war, once the nation's longest. For those who lived through it -- the last war the U.S. fought partly with draftees -- it was almost impossible not to take sides; to be pro-war or anti-war became a social and political identity unto itself. This tribal split even reached into the ranks of military veterans, as some joined antiwar movements and others remained vociferously sure that the war needed to be fought through to victory. Indeed, today, even the active-duty U.S. military officer corps is rent over assessment of the Vietnam legacy.

    I've been reading recently about how the reaction against Germany's defeat (most notoriously the "stab-in-the-back" myth) in 1918 fueled the rise of Nazism in Germany. The same thing has happened with the US right and Vietnam, leading conservatives (dedicated as ever to keeping a social order which raises the rich up and beats the poor down) more often than not to wrap themselves up in militarist myths of past and future martial glory. Nor is Vietnam the only war that those invested in "America's war machine" refuse to learn from. See: William J Astore: America's generals haven't learned anything from Iraq.

  • We are all complicit in America's war machine.

  • Who will be the last to die for a lie? The Afghan War drags on.

  • With friends like these: abusive frenemies and American Mideast policy.

• Mike Spies: Secrecy, self-dealing, and greed at the NRA.

• Joseph E Stiglitz: Progressive capitalism is not an oxymoron: This is real basic:

  Standards of living began to improve in the late 18th century for two reasons: the development of science (we learned how to learn about nature and used that knowledge to increase productivity and longevity) and developments in social organization (as a society, we learned how to work together, through institutions like the rule of law, and democracies with checks and balances).

  Key to both were systems of assessing and verifying the truth. The real and long-lasting danger of the Trump presidency is the risk it poses to these pillars of our economy and society, its attack on the very idea of knowledge and expertise, and its hostility to institutions that help us discover and assess the truth.

  There is a broader social compact that allows a society to work and prosper together, and that, too, has been fraying. America created the first truly middle-class society; now, a middle-class life is increasingly out of reach for its citizens.

  America arrived at this sorry state of affairs because we forgot that the true source of the wealth of a nation is the creativity and innovation of its people. One can get rich either by adding to the nation's economic pie or by grabbing a larger share of the pie by exploiting others -- abusing, for instance, market power or informational advantages. We confused the hard work of wealth creation with wealth-grabbing (or, as economists call it, rent-seeking), and too many of our talented young people followed the siren call of getting rich quickly.

  Also see Andrew Ross Sorkin's interview with Stiglitz: Socialist! Capitalist! Economic systems as weapons in a war of words. Stiglitz has a new book: People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (WW Norton).

• Simon Tisdall: Trump's veto over Yemen is a scandalous abuse of presidential power.

• Alexia Underwood: The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is dead. An expert explains why. Interview with Khaled Elgindy, author of Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians From Balfour to Trump. Some more links on Israel and last week's election:

  • Khulood Badawi: The Israeli election put the bigotry of its political class front and center.

  • Phyllis Bennis: Trump's embrace of Netanyahu will haunt the Middle East for years.

  • Fawaz A Gerges: Netanyahu means war.

  • David M Halbfinger/Miriam Berger: For Palestinian families, 'no light at the end of the tunnel'.

  • Yousef Jabareen: With the Israeli election, the plight of Palestinians has gotten even worse.

  • Fred Kaplan: Trump as only two goals in the Middle East: crush Iran and make Bibi happy. Doesn't that reduce to just one goal? Slate has more descriptive links than the actual titles on the pages they link to, so I prefer the former. However, subhed: "Egypt's decision to quit Trump's anti-Iran coalition shows that the administration's grand plans for the Middle East have descended into farce." Still, Trump and Pompeo are doubling down. See: Josh Rogin: No more waivers: The United States will try to force Iranian oil exports to zero.

• Alex Ward:

  • Iran labels all US troops in the Middle East "terrorists": It's a response to America's similar designation of Iranian troops the day before." Actually, both designations raise into question the self-conception (and conceits) of the designator. On the other hand, US troops have killed a lot more people over the last two decades, so there's something to the charges. See Danny Sjursen, above, for more details.

  • This is how Bernie Sanders thinks about foreign policy: "The senator wants to create a global democratic movement to end oligarchy and authoritarianism." That would be a major change from US policy under both parties ever since the start of the cold war, which was to support and extend capitalist property rights everywhere, while to undermine labor and anti-colonial political movements, and very often to support local oligarchs and authoritarians against their people.

• Matthew Yglesias: What Pete Buttigieg learned from Donald Trump: "In a crowded field, it pays off to say 'yes' to everything and get attention."

Music Week

Expanded blog post, April archive (incomplete).

Music: current count 31371 [31344] rated (+27), 252 [251] unrated (+1).

May just be seasonal allergies, but feeling too lousy to even take a stab at writing an introduction. I still have XgauSez to edit and post before I go to bed tonight, so need to get onto that while I can.

A couple of notes, though. I've been talking about moving computers around for a month or more. I finally got that done this week. Best thing so far is that I have two relatively uncluttered desks to work on, instead of one hopelessly messy one. Also I moved the speakers above the desk, where they sound better and I can access the controls. (Also, now both computers have speakers. Subwoofers are still under the desk, where they should be, and that space is less cluttered than before. No website work yet, but I should get to that soon.

Delighted to see Michael Tatum's A Downloader's Diary (49) finally posted. I checked out a couple of his recommendations below (also found a new live Pet Shop Boys he didn't mention). Also continuing to pick albums off from Phil Overeem's 25% through the briar patch list.

Finally, I finally did manage to cast a Downbeat Critics Poll ballot, a day past the deadline, but seems likely to be counted (not that I could ever tell from the results). I didn't do a very good job of collecting notes this time, but here is what I have.

New records reviewed this week:

• Charlotte Adigery: Zandoli (2019, Deewee, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Etienne Charles: Carnival: The Sound of a People Vol. 1 (2019, Culture Shock Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Ben Lamar Gay: Confetti in the Sky Like Fireworks [This Is Bate Bola OST] (2018 [2019], International Anthem): [r]: B
• Ariana Grande: Thank U, Next (2019, Republic): [r]: B+(**)
• William Hooker: Cycle of Restoration (2018 [2019], FPE): [r]: B+(*)
• Amber Mark: Conexão (2018, Virgin EMI, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Wynton Marsalis: Bolden: Music From the Original Soundtrack (2019, Blue Engine): [cd]: B+(***)
• Xose Miguélez: Ontology (2018 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Billy Mohler: Focus! (2019, Make): [cd]: A-
• OGJB Quartet [Oliver Lake/Graham Haynes/Joe Fonda/Barry Altschul]: Bamako (2016 [2019], TUM): [cd]: B+(***)
• Nicki Parrott: From New York to Paris (2019, Arbors): [r]: B+(**)
• Jeremy Pelt: Jeremy Pelt the Artist (2018 [2019], HighNote): [r]: B+(*)
• Pet Shop Boys: Agenda (2019, X2, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Pet Shop Boys: Inner Sanctum (2018 [2019], X2): [r]: A-
• Joshua Redman Quartet: Come What May (2018 [2019], Nonesuch): [r]: B+(***)
• Ruby Rushton: Ironside (2018 [2019], 22a): [r]: B
• Jim Snidero: Waves of Calm (2019, Savant): [r]: B+(***)
• Dave Stryker: Eight Track III (2019, Strikezone): [cd]: B+(**)
• James Suggs: You're Gonna Hear From Me (2018, Arbors): [r]: B+(**)
• Fumi Tomita: The Elephant Vanishes (2018 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B
• Warren Vaché: Songs Our Fathers Taught Us (2019, Arbors): [r]: B+(***)
• Dann Zinn: Day of Reckoning (2018 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Louis Armstrong: Sparks, Nevada 1964! (1964 [2018], Dot Time): [r]: A-
• Imamu Amiri Baraka: It's Nation Time: African Visionary Music (1972 [2018], Motown): [r]: B+(***)
• Duke Ellington: In Coventry, 1966 (1966 [2018], Storyville): [r]: B
• Ben Lamar Gay: 500 Chains (2013-14 [2018], International Anthem): [r]: B+(***)
• Ben Lamar Gay: Grapes (2013-14 [2018], International Anthem): [r]: B+(*)
• Ben Lamar Gay/Edinho Gerber: Benjamin E Edinho (2011-13 [2018], International Anthem, EP): [r]: B+(*)
• Joanne Grauer: Introducing Lorraine Feather (1978 [2018], MPS): [r]: B+(*)
• Kankyo Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environental and New Age Music 1980-1990 (1980-90 [2019], Light in the Attic): [r]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Juan Álamo & Marimjazzia: Ruta Panoramica (Summit)
• Larry Koonse: New Jazz Standards Vol. 4 (Summit)
• Lisa Maxwell's Jazz Orchestra: Shiny! (Uncle Marvin Music): May 17
• Sam Ospovat: Ride Angles (Skirl)
• Marcos Silva: Brasil: From Head to Toe (Green Egg): May 3

Weekend Roundup

I don't feel up to writing much about Julian Assange, but following his arrest in London, I anticipate that I'll find a bunch of links this week and should collect them together. Assange is an Australian, a computer programmer who came up with Wikileaks, a system to collect and publish anonymously submitted documents. That's always seemed like a noble endeavor, an aid in exposing how the rich and powerful conspire in private to manipulate and profit, and for a while he seemed to be doing just that. He quickly ran afoul of those powers, most notably the US government, which set out to charge him with various crimes, and quite possibly orchestrated a broader smear campaign against him. Assange, in turn, sought asylum from criminal charges, and since 2012 has been sheltered by the Ecuadorean embassy in London. I don't know how much Assange has had to do with Wikileaks since 2012 (or how much freedom he has had to do anything), but his brand name wound up playing a role in Trump's 2016 campaign when it framed the release of hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. One effect of the DNC dump was to expand the Democratic side of bipartisan outrage against Assange, especially as Clinton's drones tried to paint him as a Putin accomplice.

I don't have strong opinions about Assange one way or the other, but I did welcome his release of leaked documents on the Iraq War and the US State Department. (See my September 2, 2010 entry, Troops, on the "Collateral Murder" video, anti-war vet Ethan McCord, and a related speech by Barak Obama -- what I said then is still pretty relevant today.) Releasing the DNC emails didn't particularly bother me either, although the timing was suspicious (immediately after the release of Trump's Access Hollywood tape, allowing the media to spin scandal on top of scandal), as was the lack of any RNC/Trump campaign emails to balance the picture.

Anyhow, the Assange links:

• James Ball: You don't have to like Julian Assange to defend him.

• Nicholas Casey/Jo Becker: As Ecuador harbored Assange, it was subjected to threats and leaks.

• John Cassidy: The indictment of Julian Assange is a threat to journalism.

• Patrick Cockburn: Accusing Assange of being a 'narcissist' misses the point.

• Jonathan Cook: After 7 years of deceptions about Assange, the US readies for its first media rendition.

• Glenn Greenwald/Micah Lee: The US government's indictment of Julian Assange poses grave threats to press freedom.

• Colin Lecher: Read the United States' indictment against Julian Assange: "One count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion."

• Anna North: The rape allegation against Julian Assange, explained.

• Richard Pérez-Peña: Extraditing Assange promises to be a long, difficult process.

• John Pilger: The Assange arrest is a warning from history.

• Andrew Prokop: Julian Assange was just arrested and now faces extradition to the United States.

• Nathan Robinson: Many Democrats and liberals are cheering Assange's arrest. That's foolish.

• Emily Stewart: The debate over what Julian Assange's arrest means for freedom of the press, explained.

• Matt Taibbi: Why the Assange arrest should scare reporters.

Let's also break out multiple links on Israel's elections:

• Klulood Badawi: The Israeli election put the bigotry of its political class front and center.

• Zack Beauchamp: Israeli democracy is rotting from the inside: "Tuesday's election results exposed two major threats to Israeli democracy."

• Patrick Cockburn: Netanyahu's victory tells us who holds power in the Middle East.

• Jonathan Ofir: Why Israeli election results may have a positive aspect. Well, not really, but anyone who still clung to the notion that the center-left might agree to a two-state deal should realize now that there's no such group left to pin your hopes on (as opposed to the old days when there were groups that seemed willing to consider a deal, even though none actually went through with it).

• Israel Shamir: The Israeli elections came to naught.

• Richard Silverstein: Netanyahu wins and will be next Prime Minister of the Judeo-Ethno-State. Not on Israel, but also by Silverstein: Sudan democratic awakening, Libya civil war pose regional threat, invite Saudi meddling: with automatic support from Trump, natch.

• Kate: Israeli forces shoot 66 Palestinians at Gaza protest, killing 15-year-old boy: Not on the elections, just another routine week of occupation and conflict.

Scattered links on other topics this week:

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Julian Castro really wants to talk about immigration, but it's most impressive talking about his work.

  • Trump's sister quietly retired in February, and it's actually a big deal: Something here I didn't know: that Trump has a sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, who is a US Court of Appeals judge (appointed, by the way, by Bill Clinton in 1999, although Ronald Reagan appointed her to US District Court in 1983). She retired to escape an investigation into the possibly fraudulent scheme whereby Fred Trump transferred property to his children to evade taxes.

  • Elizabeth Warren's new plan to make sure Amazon (and other big companies) pays corporate tax, explained: "No more claiming big profits to investors while paying nothing to the IRS."

  • Progressives should worry more about the odds that Joe Biden will win: "Liberals are assuming the former vice president will fade on his own, a trap Republicans fell for with Trump." They may both be front-runners, but not many similarities beyond that. Trump campaigned as an outsider, whereas Biden is the most complete insider even considering a run. The most comparable 2016 Republican is Jeb Bush, although I'd give Biden better odds than I gave Bush -- he may not have much of a program or a real following, but at least he's not a laughingstock.

  • Immigration makes America great. This is a good general "explainer" on most of issues related to immigration. I'm more of a moderate (or maybe skeptic?) when it comes to promoting immigration: I'm concerned about the downward pressure on labor markets immigrants pose; I worry that immigration feeds our right-wing tendencies to ignore the needs of impoverished natives; I've noted that many immigrants lean to the political right (in many cases becoming jingoistic -- the Cubans are an obvious case, since US immigration law favors anti-communists). I've noted, for instance, that no less than five (of 16) Republican presidential candidates in 2016 has at least one foreign-born parent (including Trump, who also has a foreign-born wife). Still, I don't doubt the general economic advantages of immigration at present (or slightly elevated) levels. And the problems I've noted would go away if we had a better political atmosphere.

  • Trump's flailing shake-up of the Department of Homeland Security, explained: Key subhed here: "Trump's been in tantrum mode for weeks."

    But Trump is an all-stick, no-carrot kind of guy. His idea of doing a deal with Democrats was to cancel DACA protection for young undocumented immigrants and then offer to reinstate it in exchange for sweeping concessions. And he wants to get Mexico to do favors for him by threatening to hurt both countries' economies unless they do what he wants. This incredibly punitive, wildly ineffective approach to dealmaking has been a hallmark of Trump's approach to the presidency from Day 1, and it appears to be derived from his success as a business executive at using his greater wealth to stiff contractors and shareholders.

    But in the presidency, this kind of bullying doesn't work at all, as you can see from his lack of success in getting border wall money appropriated. A reasonable response to policy failure would be to try to go in a new direction, but Trump seems entirely uninterested in that. So rather than rethink his approach, he's now inclined to burn through administration personnel, even though shuffling the names on an org chart around isn't going to alter any of the fundamentals of the situation.

  • Howard Schultz only has one idea about politics, and it's bad: "Making him president won't fix the problems of partisanship."

  • Trump's possibly illegal designation of a new acting homeland security secretary, explained.

• Zack Beauchamp: Republicans are taking Ilhan Omar's comments on 9/11 out of context to smear her. Well, when did they ever let context complicate a good smear?

• David Dayen: Betsy DeVos quietly making it easier for dying for-profit schools to rip off a few more students on the way out.

• Sean Illing: Why conspiracy theories are getting more absurd and harder to refute: Interview with Nancy L Rosenblum, co-author (with Russell Muirhead) of A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy.

• Umair Irfan: A brief guide to David Bernhardt, Ryan Zinke's replacement at the Interior Department: "Three things to know about the former oil lobbyist who's just been confirmed as the new Secretary of the Interior."

• Kalpana Jain: 4 key things to know about India's elections Thursday.

• Jen Kirby: The new Brexit deadline is October 31.

• Dara Lind: The post-purge agenda: what the White House wants next on immigration: "Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are pushing for a multi-pronged asylum crackdown."

• German Lopez:

  • New Zealand Parliament votes 119-1 to ban assault weapons.

  • Most Americans agree Trump has made race relations worse.

• Ella Nilsen: Why the Senate is blocking a new net neutrality bill, a year after trying to save it. The House passed a bill. McConnell refuses to allow the Senate to consider it. Trump says if passed he will veto it.

• Anna North: A Texas bill would allow the death penalty for patients who get abortions: "The bill is unlikely to pass, but it's part of a larger trend."

• Trita Parsi: Trump's Iran terrorist designation is designed to lock in endless enmity. Related: Daniel DePetris/Richard Sokolsky: Bolton and Pompeo are steering Trump toward war with Iran; Robert Mackey: On the eve of Israel's elections, Netanyahu thanks Trump for sanctioning Iran at his request.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Former Obama White House counsel indicted in charges stemming from Mueller probe: Greg Craig, "charged with two counts of making false statements in a Justice Department inquiry into whether his law firm Skadden Arps should have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) because of its work for the Ukrainian government." Craig left the Obama administration in 2010. Got involved in Ukrain at Paul Manafort's behest.

  • What does Bill Barr mean when he says he'll review US "spying" on Trump's campaign? "Barr voiced sympathy to some long-running conservative criticisms about the Russia probe's handling."

• Gabriela Resto-Montero:

  • Democrats unite to condemn Trump tweet linking Ilhan Omar and 9/11.

  • Trump officials say sanctuary city migrant plan under review.

• Josie Duffy Rice: Jussie Smollett and the impulse to punish. Chicago's outgoing mayor Rahm Emmanuel, cementing his reputation as a grandstanding dickhead, ordered the city to sue Jussie Smollett for the costs of investigating him before dropping charges, some $130,000.

  Given the failures of law enforcement in Chicago, [F.O.P. president Kevin] Graham is not in a strong position to castigate [Cook County states attorney] Foxx. In the first half of 2018, Chicago police made an arrest or identified a suspect in just fifteen per cent of murder cases. Similarly, Emanuel's concern about the costs of the Smollett investigation is misguided at best; in 2018 alone, the city paid a total of a hundred and thirteen million dollars in police-misconduct settlements and related legal fees. . . .

  As Matthew Saniie, the chief data officer for Foxx's office, recently wrote, in Cook County, cases in which the defendant, like Smollett, pleads not guilty to a fourth-degree felony end in a deferred prosecution seventy-five per cent of the time. Foxx runs the second-largest prosecutor's office in the country, responsible for prosecuting crimes in Chicago and a hundred and thirty-four municipalities. Her staff sees almost half a million cases every year. Prosecutorial discretion is one of the pillars of our justice system, and it is her job to discern what deserves her staff's attention, as opposed to what has grabbed the most public attention.

• Aaron Rupar: Trump promised his sons would keep business out of politics. He's admitting that was a lie. This links to: Elaina Plott: Inside Ivanka's dreamworld: "The 'first daughter' spent years rigorously cultivating her image. But she wasn't prepared for scrutiny."

• Kirk Semple: Central American farmers head to the US, fleeing climate change.

• Peter Stone: Trump hotels exempted from ban on foreign payments under new stance.

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Bernie Sanders imagines a progressive new approach to foreign policy: While the rest of the field plays catch up with his 2016 platform, he breaks new ground. But his main break with the bipartisan orthodoxy is thus far limited to sensibility. He's more likely to promote peace and respect than the others because he values them, but he's yet to get down to the specifics it will take to deal with Israel/Palestine, to pick the one case other politicians most fear.

• Alex Ward:

  • How America's relationship with Turkey fell apart.

  • Trump laments that US troops can't get "rough" with migrants at the border.

  • Trump just tweeted that he wants to put huge tariffs on EU products. Here's why.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, April archive (incomplete).

Music: current count 31344 [31312] rated (+32), 251 [249] unrated (+2).

Back in business. I figured all it would take to get Napster working again was a reboot -- it broke following a software update that didn't require one but involved a new Flash module, so I suspected that threw things out of sync. Still, I didn't want to do that for other reaasons, but was forced to when the computer freaked out and gave me a swizzle patterned screen. That suggested something far worse, but the reboot fixed that too.

Working Napster gave me a chance to catch up with the last couple weeks of Robert Christgau picks -- Stella Donnelly/Sharon Van Etten and Pedro the Lion/Jason Ringenberg -- where only the B+ record didn't disappoint. (Actually, I couldn't find Ringenberg's Stand Tall on Napster, but was able to fish a Soundcloud link from my email trash, so thanks to the publicist.) Guess I'm still missing the Ariana Grande/Amber Mark week -- I had the former's Sweetener way down at B, a grade split matching Mitski's Be the Cowboy, but haven't heard the more recent one.

Took a dive into George Strait after panning his new one, mostly because I noticed an unheard Christgau A- in the database (Something Special), and it panned out. I had his first Greatest Hits (1985) at A-, so it made sense to check out its source albums (just three of them). I'm not sure that grade holds up, but didn't recheck it. Still, after dismissing most of his songs as unmemorable, I've wound up with "You Look So Good in Love" stuck in my mind all week.

Other records suggested by various sources, most prolifically Phil Overeem. The tip on Angel-Ho came from breathless hype in The Nation ("Angel-Ho is the future of pop music"). I dug up Petra Van Nuis after she wrote to me (so sometimes that works). Strait and Mandy Barnett just showed up in Napster's featured lists.

Making fair progress on most projects, although not enough on moving the computer. (Will do that after I post this, I promise.) Biggest one is a new piece of badly-needed pantry shelving, which needs one more coat of paint before I drag it in and bolt it to the wall. I have a couple more projects in that space, ready to roll as soon as the first one is operational. Still, more projects seem to present themselves all the time. Dug up a couple plastic drawers full of CDs today, and my wife argued that I should get rid of them (something about the hoarding being psychotic). I had a plan a couple years back to start donating CDs to a local library, but never followed through on it -- partly because I was working on the Jazz Guide, maybe because they kept naming various buldings after the Kochs. The reason for having a substantial library is to look things up, but I'm fast losing my ability to do so, not to mention my prospects of ever writing anything worthwhile on the subject.

Still, the project I feel more pressing need for is to come up with a system so I can quickly identify where all my tools (and hardware) are. I'm forever thrashing, trying to find things I know I have somewhere, sometimes even having to buy more tools to replace those I've lost (most recently, a set of hole saws). In fact, thrashing seems to be the word for the week, maybe even the season.

New records reviewed this week:

• Angel-Ho: Death Becomes Her (2019, Hyperdub): [r]: B+(*)
• Art "Turk" Burton: Ancestral Spirits (2019, T N' T Music): [cd]: A-
• Romain Collin: Tiny Lights: Genesis (2019, XM): [cd]: B+(**)
• The Comet Is Coming: Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery (2019, Impulse!): [r]: B+(**)
• Jordon Dixon: On! (2019, self-released): [cd]: B+(***)
• Stella Donnelly: Beware of the Dogs (2019, Secretly Canadian): [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Earle & the Dukes: Guy (2019, New West): [r]: B+(***)
• Fleurine: Brazilian Dream (2018 [2019], Pure Imagination): [cd]: B+(**)
• George Freeman: George the Bomb! (2018 [2019], Blujazz/Southport): [cd]: B+(**)
• Polly Gibbons: All I Can Do (2019, Resonance): [cd]: B
• Girls on Grass: Dirty Power (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Pablo Lanouguere Quintet: Eclectico (2019, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jenny Lewis: On the Line (2019, Warner Bros.): [r]: B+(*)
• Helado Negro: This Is How You Smile (2019, RVNG Intl): [r]: B+(*)
• New Orleans Jazz Orchestra: Songs: The Music of Allen Toussaint (2018 [2019], Storyville): [cd]: B+(**)
• Pedro the Lion: Phoenix (2019, Polyvinyl): [r]: B+(*)
• Jason Ringenberg: Stand Tall (2019, Courageous Chicken): [sc]: A-
• Royal Trux: White Stuff (2019, Fat Possum): [r]: B+(**)
• Sir Babygirl: Crush on Me (2019, Father/Daughter, EP): [r]: B+(***)
• George Strait: Honky Tonk Time Machine (2019, MCA Nashville): [r]: B
• Terraza Big Band: One Day Wonder (2017 [2019], Outside In Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Sharon Van Etten: Remind Me Tomorrow (2019, Jagjaguwar): [r]: B+(*)
• Petra Van Nuis & Dennis Luxion: Because We're Night People (2018, String Damper): [r]: B+(*)
• Dave Zinno Unisphere: Stories Told (2018 [2019], Whaling City Sound): [cd]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Burnt Sugar/The Arkestra Chamber: Twentieth Anniversary Mixtapes: Groiddest Schnizzits: Volume Two (2001-17 [2019], Trugroid/Avantgroidd): [r]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Mandy Barnett: I Can't Stop Loving You: The Songs of Don Gibson (2013, Rounder): [r]: B+(***)
• The Comet Is Coming: Channel the Spirits (2016, The Leaf Label): [r]: B+(***)
• George Strait: Strait Country (1981, MCA): [r]: B+(**)
• George Strait: Strait From the Heart (1982, MCA): [r]: B
• George Strait: Right or Wrong (1983, MCA): [r]: B+(***)
• George Strait: Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind (1984, MCA): [r]: B+(**)
• George Strait: Something Special (1985, MCA): [r]: A-
• George Strait: The Best of George Strait [20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection] (1983-93 [2002], MCA Nashville): [r]: B+(**)
• George Strait: 50 Number Ones (1982-2004 [2004], MCA Nashville, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Art Ensemble of Chicago: We Are on the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration (Pi, 2CD): April 26
• Art "Turk" Burton: Ancestral Spirits (T N' T Music): May 3
• George Freeman: George the Bomb! (Blujazz/Southport)
• Wynton Marsalis: Bolden: Music From the Original Soundtrack (Blue Engine): April 19
• Xose Miguélez: Ontology (Origin): April 19
• Billy Mohler: Focus! (Make)
• New Orleans Jazz Orchestra: Songs: The Music of Allen Toussaint (Storyville): April 19
• OGJB Quartet [Oliver Lake/Graham Haynes/Joe Fonda/Barry Altschul]: Bamako (TUM): May 17
• Dave Stryker: Eight Track III (Strikezone): May 3
• Fumi Tomita: The Elephant Vanishes (OA2): April 19
• Dann Zinn: Day of Reckoning (Origin): April 19

Weekend Roundup

One of my principles here is not to bother with politician horserace links, especially presidential candidates. One thing I've long held is that a president is only as good as his (or someday her) party, so the big question to ask any presidential candidate is: what are you going to do to get your party elected and make it an effective force? Still, every now and then I have opinions on specific people. When Greg Magarian griped about Tim Ryan and Michael Bennet getting a burst of press attention, as have recent stories about Beto O'Rourke and Pete Buttigieg raising great gobs of money, I commented:

Worth noting that O'Rourke and Buttigieg are principled neoliberals, and are raising money as such. They can do that because their youth and inexperience hasn't saddled them with the sort of baggage the Clinton establishment bears. That's bad news for Biden, who would be the obvious next-in-line for Clinton's donors if they didn't suspect that the brand is ruined. They may also be thinking that running someone young and outside might help crack Sanders' lead among young voters -- something Biden has no prayer of doing.

The one candidate I've been hearing the most (and most negative) about is Joe Biden. He hasn't announced yet, but evidently the decision has been made, the timing around Easter. Biden has led recent polls, but that can be attributed to his much greater name resolution. I've always figured the decision would turn on whether he's willing to risk his legacy on a very likely loss, but I suppose the decision will turn mostly on whether he can line up sufficient funding. (I had some doubts that Bernie Sanders would run, but when I saw his early funding reports, I immediately realized I was being silly.) Clearly, he didn't run in 2016 because Hillary Clinton had locked up most of his possible funding. That's less obvious this year, but a lot of competitive candidates have jumped in ahead of him.

Biden isn't awful, but he has a lot of baggage, including a lot of things that wound up hurting Clinton in 2016 (like that Iraq War vote). Some of those things could hurt him in the primaries, especially his rather dodgy record on race and crime, and with women. Other things, like his plagiarism scandal, will hurt him more in the general election. But the big problem there is that he was a Washington insider and party leader for so long that he makes it easy for Republicans to spin this election into a referendum on forty years of Democratic Party failures. Obama was largely able to avoid that in 2008, but Clinton couldn't in 2016.

Also, there is the nagging suspicion that he isn't really a very good day-to-day candidate. Last time he ran for president he was an also-ran, unable to get more than 1-2% of the vote anywhere. He got the VP nod from Obama after Clinton decided she'd rather be Secretary of State, and one suspects that the Clintons pushed for Biden as VP because they didn't regard him as a serious rival in 2016 (when a sitting VP would normally have the inside track to the nomination). And he's exceptionally prone to gaffes. He managed to avoid any really bad ones running with Obama, but running on his own he'll get a lot more scrutiny and pressure. Nobody thinks he's stupid or evil -- unlike Trump, whose base seems to regard those attributes as virtues -- but nobody is much of a fan either (well, except for the fictional Leslie Knope, which kind of proves the point).

For more, if you care, see Michelle Goldberg: The wrong time for Joe Biden:

Beyond gender, on issue after issue, if Biden runs for president he will have to run away from his own record. He -- and by extension, we -- will have to relive the debate over the Iraq war, which he voted to authorize. He'll have to explain his vote to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which, by lifting regulations on banking, helped create the conditions for the 2008 financial meltdown. (Biden has called that vote one of the biggest regrets of his career.) In 2016, Hillary Clinton was slammed for her previous support of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which contributed to mass incarceration. Biden helped write the law, which he called, in 2015, the "1994 Biden crime bill." . . . No one should judge the whole span of Biden's career by the standards of 2019, but if he's going to run for president, it's fair to ask whether he's the right leader for this moment. He is a product of his time, but that time is up.

Other political news last week included the death of Ernest Hollings, the long-time South Carolina senator, at 97. I was, well, shocked to see him referred to in an obituary as a populist -- a thought that had never crossed my mind. I would grant that he was not as bad as the Republicans who served in the Senate alongside him (Strom Thurmond and Lindsey Graham), or his Republican successor (Jim DeMent). Still, those are pretty low standards.

By the way, a couple of non-political links below: subjects I used to follow closely in more carefree times. See if you can pick them out.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The Democratic debate over filibuster reform, explained. One way you can tell whether Democratic candidates actually care about implementing their platforms is where they stand on this issue. The strongest position so far is from Elizabeth Warren.

  • Boeing's effort to get the 737 Max approved to fly again, explained.

  • The controversy over Joe Biden's treatment of women explained.

  • The Great Awokening: white Democrats' newfound racial liberalism is transforming politics.

• Jonathan Blitzer: How climate change is fueling the US border crisis: "In the western highlands of Guatemala, the questio is no longer whether someone will leave but when." Two further installments: The epidemic of debt plaguing Central American migrants, and The dream homes of Guatemalan migrants.

• Philip Bump: Nearly everything Trump just said about Puerto Rico is wrong.

• Jane Coaston: FBI director: White nationalist violence is a "persistent, pervasive threat". Related: Weiyi Cai/Simone Landon: Attacks by white extremists are growing. So are their connections.

• Sean Collins: Barack Obama warns against a "circular firing squad" over ideological purity in politics: Sounds like Obama is attacking the left, once again counseling compromises that ultimately prove ineffective, but his centrist-neoliberal allies are every bit as ideological, and if anything have more experience in using their spite against the left to make sure even their lame compromises rarely change anything. I'm reminded how John Lewis refused to purge Communists from the UMW, because he appreciated that they were the union's most passionate and effective organizers. The centrists need to realize that they need the left in order to attain anything significant once they've worked their compromises. And as the article shows, left-leaning polticians aren't actually doing things to undermine party unity -- other than making solid policy proposals and arguing them on their merits. Obama, on the other hand, is showing himself to be irrelevant. Some may feel nostalgic for his basic competence and his devotion to the threadbare pieties of Americanism, but as a politician you have to judge him on his inability to deliver the change he campaigned for and his failure to build a party that could protect, sustain, and extend even his most modest dreams.

• Tara Golshan: Congress passes historic resolution to end US support for Saudi-led war in Yemen.

• David M Halbfinger:

  • An Israel charts a future, color and chaos abound in its election.

  • Netanyahu vows to start annexing West Bank, in bid to rally the right.

  • In Israeli election ads, to stir up the base, anything goes.

  If you've followed Israeli elections, you may have noticed that since the late 1970s, the only time Israeli politics have shifted left was when the Bush I administration made clear its displeasure with Yitzhak Shamir's obstruction of the Madrid Peace Talks. Israeli voters noticed, and voted the more flexible Yitzhak Rabin in, leading to the Oslo Accords, which Clinton allowed Netanyahu and Ehud Barak to turn into a charade. But as Clinton, Bush, Obama, and even more explicitly Trump kowtowed to Israel, Israelis had no reason not to indulge their chauvinist prejudices, with each election pushing the government ever further to the right.

• Sean Illing: How digital technology is destroying our freedom: Interview with Douglas Rushkoff, exploring the theme of his recent Team Human and earlier books like Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation (2009), Program or Be Programmed (2011), Present Shock: When Everything Happes Now (2013), and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (2016) -- he's sort of a latter-day Neil Postman. (The one book I've read by him is Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, where he sees Judaism as an evolutionary step toward atheism. I could make a similar claim for Calvinism, based more on personal history.)

• Sarah Kliff: Trump does have a health care plan. It would cause millions to lose coverage.

• Mike Konczal: Should the Green New Deal repeat the failures of Cap-and-Trade?

• Paul Krugman:

  • Donald Trump is trying to kill you: "Trust the pork producers; fear the wind turbines." I will add this quibble: if you ever find yourself standing under a wind turbine, you'll find that they are very ominous and unpleasant, emitting loud noises as the huge blades screech and whine above your head.

  • Republican health care lying syndrome: "Even Trump supporters don't believe the party's promises."

  • The incredible shrinking Trump boom: "At least corporate accountants are having some fun." I suspect this title could be used for a much broader investigation than this note on the effects of the Trump tax cut.

  • GOP cruelty is a pre-existing condition: "Republicans just won't stop trying to take away health care."

  • Republicans really hate health care: "They've gone beyond cynicism to pathology." Related: Jamelle Bouie: An opening for Democrat: "On health care, this isn't what Trump's voters bargained for." Bouie writes:

    But while Trump's decision to govern for conservatives has netted him high approval ratings with Republicans who remain loyal to him, it has also undermined the coalition that put him in the White House, threatening his prospects for re-election.

    We saw some of this with the midterms. The drive to repeal Obamacare was a major reason Republicans lost their majority in the House of Representatives. The attempt made Trump's approval rating plunge to the mid-30s, lower than that of other presidents at that point in their first term. Large majorities opposed the bill to repeal and replace the health care law, and 60 percent said it was a "good thing" it failed to pass. Forty-two percent of voters named health care as their top issue in the midterms, and 77 percent of them backed Democrats.

    In 2016, Trump ran without the burden of a record. He could be everything to everyone -- he could say what people wanted to hear. And he used that to reach out to working-class whites as a moderate on the economy and a hard-line conservative on race and immigration.

    Now, as president, Trump is a standard-issue Republican with an almost total commitment to conservative economic policy. Those policies are unpopular. And they have created an opening for Democrats to win back some of the voters they've lost.

• Dara Lind:

  • The border shutdown was a reality show threat, but the border slowdown is real.

  • Trump's decision to cut off aid to 3 Central American countries, explained. Related: Kevin Sieff: US officials said aid to El Salvador helped slow migration. How Trump is canceling it.

• German Lopez:

  • Trump is blaming Mexico for the US's drug problem. He should blame a failed war on drugs.

  • Justice Department releases damning report on Alabama's gruesome, violent prisons.

• Jonathan Mahler/Jim Rutenberg: How Rupert Murdoch's empire of influence remade the world: Part 1: Imperial reach, followed by Part 2: Internal divisions, and Part 3: The new Fox weapon.

• Louis Menand: What baseball teaches us about measuring talent: Review of Christopher Phillips' new book Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball. Noted because this is a subject I've spent a lot of time on, albeit not very recently.

• Kelsey Piper: Google cancels AI ethics board in response to outcry: I can imagine many angles to this, but the best reported one was opposition to Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James, underscoring the notion that conservatives have no credibility when it comes to ethics -- although Google's inclusion of a "drone company CEO" was even more blatant.

• Douglas Preston: The day the dinosaurs died: "A young paleontologist may have discovered the most significant event in the history of life on Earth."

• Andrew Prokop: Some Mueller team members aren't happy with Barr's description of their findings.

• Aaron Rupar: Trump plans to nominate a second loyalist to the Fed: Herman Cain: You got to give Trump some credit for learning here. When the Fed chair opened up, his staff gave him two options. While he picked the lesser inflation hawk, he still wound up with a guy who repeatedly raised the Fed funds rate, constricting the economy (and especially speculators and scam artists like himself who benefit most from cheap money). No doubt this got him thinking: Why not pick some loyal political hacks instead of letting the bankers limit his choices? Stephen Moore was his test case, and while Cain isn't as much of a hack as Moore, he's even less "qualified" (in normative terms).

• Amanda Sakuma: Trump attacks Rep. Ilhan Omar hours after a supporter was charged with threatening to kill her: Subhed: "He wants to drive a wedge between Jewish voters and the Democratic Party." TPM emphasized the latter in its coverage of Trump's speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition: Zeke Miller: Trump tries to lure Jewish voters: Dems would 'leave Israel out there'. Related: Matt Shuham: American Jewish orgs to Trump: Netanyahu is ot 'our' Prime Minister. On the other hand, Netanyahu is Sheldon Adelson's Prime Minister -- Adelson owns the newspaper in Israel most closely associated with Netanyahu, and Adelson is the Republican Party's most visible Jewish bankroller, so that's probably close enough for Trump.

• Emily Stewart: What's going on with Mar-a-Lago and Chinese spies, explained. Related: Fred Kaplan: Mar-a-Lago is a foreign spy's dream come true.

• Matt Taibbi: The Pentagon wins again: "In an effort to prevent non-defense cuts, House Democrats grant the DOD exactly the raise it wanted."

• Alex Ward:

  • Saudi Arabia is detaining American activists 6 months after Khashoggi's murder: "The Saudi crown prince is cracking down on free speech and torturing activists. The US won't push back."

  • Trump has a strong foreign policy narrative for 2020: Sure, someone smarter might be able to spin this bullet list into an attractive political spiel, the items don't mesh into a coherent strategy, and he's got a lot of unsettled, and therefore risky, affairs. Still, I'm more worried that Democrats will try to counter Trump's chaos by talking stronger and more belligerent, and thereby turn Trump into the anti-war candidate.

• Philip Weiss:

  • The Israeli spring won't happen next week (and that should cause reflection)

  • Trump brags he blew off calls from world leaders to give Adelsons the greatest gift: Jerusalem.

• Sean Wilentz: The "reputational interests" of William Barr. Related: Benjamin Wittes: Bill Barr has promised transparency. He deserves the chance to deliver.

• TomDispatch:

  • Andrew Bacevich: Behind fronds of fakery, here's some real news.

  • Dilip Hiro: India and Pakistan, and a planet in peril.

  • Rajan Menon: Whose money? Not yours.

  • Danny Sjursen: On leaving the U.S. Army.

  • Tom Engelhardt: Donald Trump naked as a jaybird.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (incomplete).

Music: current count 31312 [31297] rated (+15), 249 [253] unrated (-4).

Rated count way down, about half of what I consider a solid week. When I dropped to 29 last week, I described that as a "lazy week." Could say that again, but the real reason for the drop off is that the Flash plugin on my computer is fucked up, making it impossible to use Napster (or, for that matter, Spotify). That left me with playing CDs (9) and using Bandcamp (6), and I didn't really have much to choose from or look for on either. Unplayed CD queue is currently only 7 deep, and I don't just randomly play unknowns on Bandcamp. On the other hand, the Bandcamps generally got two spins, and the CDs more than that (I'd guess Larry Fuller got 7-8 plays -- not that I needed more than 2, but it made for pretty pleasant background music). All that lead to a couple anomalies. Only one A- is the lowest weekly total in quite some time, and I'm actually not real solid on it -- I've never been much of a Betty Carter fan, and should probably go back and check some of her earlier releases (and re-check The Audience With Betty Carter, which I have at B- even though it wears a Penguin Guide crown). It could be that I promoted it at the last minute because I came up with nothing else.

The other anomaly is the high percentage of B+(***) grades (8/15). Certainly the multiple replays helped out. At this point, I'm pretty sure the jazz records (especially the CDs) have plateaued, but three of the Bandcamps might merit further investigation: Mekons, Quelle Chris, and Mdou Moctar. I think I have those three pegged right, but they're close, and it's worth noting that I have the immediately previous albums by all three at A- (It Is Twice Blessed, Everything's Fine, and Blue Stage Sessions).

Priorities for the coming week will be to reconstruct my crashed tax file, finish (paint) a new pantry shelf, and finally get my computers rearranged and reconnected (hopefully fixing the Napster problem, and allowing me to get onto some website work). Also have my DownBeat Critics Poll invite, so that will be another (pretty much wasted) chunk of time. One website task I did manage to get done last week was to build a book page for Robert Christgau's new essay collection, Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading, due out from Duke University Press on April 12. Info and various links on that page. Still to be done is the nasty task of embargoing most of the pieces that appear in the book, so this is your last change (for several years) to squirrel away free copies of most of the book.

New records reviewed this week:

• Laura Antonioli: The Constant Passage of Time (2018 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Michaël Attias: Ëchos La Nuit (2018 [2019], Out of Your Head): [cd]: B+(**)
• Blu & Oh No: A Long Red Hot Los Angeles Summer Night (2019, Native Sounds): [bc]: B+(**)
• Chord Four: California Avant Garde (2016 [2018], self-released): [cd]: B+(***)
• Larry Fuller: Overjoyed (2018 [2019], Capri): [cd]: B+(***)
• Ross Hammond & Sameer Gupta: Mystery Well (2018, Prescott): [bc]: B+(***)
• Remy Le Boeuf: Light as a Word (2017 [2019], Outside In Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Mekons: Deserted (2019, Bloodshot): [bc]: B+(***)
• Mdou Moctar: Ilana: The Creator (2019, Sahel Sounds): [bc]: B+(***)
• Ivo Perelman/Mat Maneri/Nate Wooley: Strings 3 (2018 [2019], Leo): [cd]: B+(*)
• Ivo Perelman/Mat Maneri/Nate Wooley/Matthew Shipp: Strings 4 (2018 [2019], Leo): [cd]: B+(***)
• Quelle Chris: Guns (2019, Mello Music Group): [bc]: B+(***)
• SOL Development: The SOL of Black Folk (2019, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Tiger Hatchery: Breathing in the Walls (2017 [2018], ESP-Disk): [cd]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Betty Carter: The Music Never Stops (1992 [2019], Blue Engine): [cd]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Romain Collin: Tiny Lights: Genesis (XM): April 12
• Jordon Dixon: On! (self-released): June 7
• Polly Gibbons: All I Can Do (Resonance): April 19
• Pablo Langouguere Quintet: Eclectico (self-released): May 31

Mar 2019