Monday, December 23, 2024

Opening Skirmish

I don’t think markets are properly pricing in the likely inflationary consequences of Trump’s coming war on arithmetic.

- Paul Krugman

There are no featured posts this week.

This week everybody was talking about shutting down the government

It didn't happen, but it came close, and how it came close has implications for the future.

The federal government was set to run out of money at the stroke of midnight Saturday morning. Congress hasn't been able to pass an actual set of appropriations bills since Republicans gained "control" of the House two years ago, but the government has kept going via a series of continuing resolutions that keep kicking the can down the road. Basically, a continuing resolution says that spending can continue at current levels for a few more months. Usually, a few additional expenses get added on to a continuing resolution to respond to events unforeseen by the previous appropriations.

This time, the two parties had reached consensus on a new continuing resolution to keep things running until March, and to include extra money for hurricane relief and a few other uncontroversial things. But at the last minute, Trump and Elon Musk convinced Republicans to withdraw their support. It was a typical Trump move: Blow up an agreement by asking for one more thing.

Apparently this tactic worked for him during his business career, when he was dealing with small businessmen who had already delivered their products and foolishly expected to be paid in full. But in government all it has done is delay or completely scuttle deals that benefit both sides: Trump said he would get a better agreement when he scrapped Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, and also when he pulled out of the Paris Accords on climate change. But to the best of my knowledge he has never actually closed one of these "better deals" he keeps talking about. (His supporters will claim the revision of NAFTA as a success, but that treaty was due for revision anyway, and the concessions from Mexico and Canada were almost entirely issues that Obama had already worked out as part of the TransPacific Partnership, another agreement Trump nixed. If Trump's trade war with China accomplished anything, I was never able to identify what it was.)


Anyway, the one-more-thing Trump wanted this time was to eliminate the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a limit on how much debt the US government can issue. Currently, the Treasury is actually over the limit by about $5 trillion, but Congress had avoided a self-inflicted economic disaster by suspending the debt limit until January 1. So in a few weeks the Treasury will find itself doing tricks to avoid default, unless Congress can pass something.

I have strong feelings both ways on eliminating the debt ceiling. On the one hand, the ceiling is stupid, and other nations don't have one for a simple reason: It can create situations where all options violate the law. (Congress has ordered the government to spend money, but not authorized any method of raising that money.) It's not that I'm for unlimited debt, but the place to control borrowing is through the annual budget process. Once a deficit budget is approved, the government should be authorized to borrow money to cover it.

The need to keep raising the debt limit has created a series of artificial crises: Even if nothing is wrong with the actual economy, an economic disaster will ensue unless Congress acts to untangle its own knots. For the last two decades the debt limit has been a self-destruct button that Republican terrorists in Congress repeatedly threatened to push. Eliminating it would be a good thing.

On the other hand, though, after so many years of shenanigans, I don't think Republicans should now be allowed to say, "Oh, never mind", or to posture against unlimited debt while Democrats take the blame. I want an apology for all these past crises. I want an admission that they need to raise or circumvent the debt limit because they actually have no viable plan to control the deficit, and they foresee budget deficits extending into the years when they have unified control over the government.

If they're actually as worried about debt as they always claim to be, they can pass unpopular tax increases or spending cuts.

Republicans may spout all kinds of nonsense about how their tax cuts will pay for themselves through higher growth -- which no past tax cut ever has done. And they can fantasize about huge spending cuts that only target "waste, fraud, and abuse" without causing harm to any real American households. But when it comes time to collect money and pay it out, accounting ledgers refuse to be fooled: Something will have to cover the gap between revenue and spending.

But Trump had made his demand, so House Republicans had to respond. Speaker Johnson put together a new continuing resolution that essentially just added a two-year debt ceiling suspension to the previous deal. It failed. Two Democrats voted for it, but 38 Republicans voted against it. Then the House put together a bill more-or-less the same as the one Trump and Musk rejected, and it passed.

and what this vote portends for the new Congress

Ever since Barack Obama's landslide election in 2008, the GOP has been the Party of No. What unites them is opposition to what Democrats want -- healthcare for all, equal rights for women and minorities, the rule of law, and taking action against climate change and mass shootings, for example. But for any issue other than cutting rich people's taxes, they struggle to get to Yes. Even during Trump's first term, their attempt to repeal ObamaCare -- a position they'd been running on for years -- failed because they couldn't agree on a replacement plan.

The vote on the continuing resolutions was similar. Trump could demand that Republicans reject the deal on the table, but he couldn't get them to approve the resolution he wanted.

It will be interesting to see if the House will be able to function at all when the new Congress starts in January. Will Republicans be able to return Speaker Johnson to the gavel? Or agree on any speaker? What happens if they haven't resolved that question by January 6, when they're constitutionally obligated to count the electoral votes and announce the new president?


Going forward, Republicans in Congress will need to unite around a plan to circumvent the debt ceiling and fund the government past March. Then Trump will have an FY 2026 budget proposal. That budget will have to solidify the vague posturing he did in the 2024 campaign and is still doing. It either will or won't implement sweeping spending cuts like the ones Musk keeps talking about. It will or won't include billions to build the concentration camps his mass deportation plans will require. It will or won't repeal ObamaCare or cut Social Security benefits or eliminate the Department of Education.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump created a fog of uncertainty around his plans that journalists never bothered to dispel. He will deport 10-20 million immigrants, but only the criminal ones. He will raise tariffs, deport cheap labor, and still bring down inflation. He'll massively cut government spending without touching the programs that any particular voter cares about. And so on.

But budgets are not foggy. They fund some things but not others. They tax some things but not others. The number on the bottom line is either positive or negative.

This is the beginning of what I talked about last week: Until Trump actually takes power, he can be all things to all people. He can just claim that America is going to be great again, that all our problems will disappear, and that only bad people will be hurt by his policies. But governing involves choices, and the choices he makes will disappoint many of his voters. What those disappointments are will dictate how Democrats run against him in 2026 and 2028.


I'm late noticing this, but Paul Krugman did a good job of taking down the "waste, fraud, and abuse" claims of Musk and the other would-be budget-cutters. We've seen these government "efficiency" commissions before, usually better staffed and more serious that DOGE appears to be.

There is, of course, inefficiency and waste in the federal government, as there is in any large organization. But most government spending happens because it delivers something people want, and you can’t make significant cuts without hard choices.

Furthermore, the notion that businessmen have skills that readily translate into managing the government is all wrong. Business and government serve different purposes and require different mindsets.

I think Krugman has come up with a good label for the kinds of cuts the DOGE barons keep talking about: doing Willie Sutton in reverse. Sutton was the mid-20th-century thief who famously answered a question about why he robbed banks: "Because that's where the money is."

What's fundamentally unserious about Musk and his partner Vivek Ramaswamy is that they keep targeting places the money isn't, like foreign aid or federal payrolls. Cutting all foreign aid (including the money that goes to countries you like) and firing all government employees (including the ones you rely on) would not make a serious dent in the deficit.

If you want to cut government spending in any significant way, you have to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or Defense. Defense is its own discussion, but the other three are very low-overhead programs, so the only significant cuts would be cuts to benefits.

and Trump's media strategy

If Trump is going to succeed in his plan to turn America into a fake democracy like Orban's Hungary, he'll need a complacent media to keep the public complacent. His plans to achieve that are taking shape.

Fundamentally, American media is split into two parts:

  • News organizations that are part of giant corporations like CNN (Warner Brothers Discovery) or MSNBC (NBC Universal).
  • Stand-alone organizations like The Guardian or Pro Publica.

The Washington Post appears to stand alone, but its owner (Jeff Bezos) is also a major shareholder in Amazon. We'll get to The New York Times in a minute.

Trump's media-domination strategy is similarly twofold: The weakness of the conglomerate-owned sites is that their parent organizations are susceptible to government bribery or intimidation. Amazon, for example, either will or won't receive government contracts, and could be threatened with antitrust enforcement or profit-killing regulations. In court, it would be hard to connect those bribes and threats to specific news stories, and so their effect on the freedom of the press would be deniable.

The stand-alone organizations, on the other hand, don't have the deep pockets of a major corporation behind them, so they can be exhausted by frivolous litigation. We can see the beginnings of this already in Trump's suit against The Des Moines Register for a pre-election poll that (erroneously) showed Trump trailing in Iowa.

Matt Bai:

If bad polls put you in legal jeopardy, there wouldn’t be a newspaper left in America, which might be the goal. There is something truly diabolical, but also very smart, about trying to spend the media into submission at this moment. It’s un-American, but it might also work.

The Register is owned by Gannett, and so is not a perfect example. But it's easy to imagine how this strategy could unfold: Nearly every expose' by Pro Publica could be result in a defamation suit. All the suits would be baseless, but who would cover the legal bills to defeat them?

That leaves us with The New York Times, which is large enough to field a team of lawyers, but is also a stand-alone corporation. But in view of its sorry performance in covering the 2024 campaign, Trump may not need any nefarious way to keep the NYT in check.

and the Constitution

Trumpists are already floating the third-term idea, putting out the idea that the limit is only on consecutive terms. Just so you know, here's what the 22nd Amendment says:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

So there's nothing difficult to interpret here. Nothing ambiguous, nothing about consecutive terms. It's no third term, period. If Trump is president beyond January 20, 2029, the Constitution has been violated.


Another Constitution-busting idea we're going to hear a lot about is eliminating birthright citizenship. Here's what the 14th Amendment says:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Trump keeps saying he can end birthright citizenship by executive action. If he tries to follow through on that, we'll have to count on the Supreme Court to decide whether the Constitution still means anything.

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Remember the uproar over "Defund the Police"? The slogan was a political loser, but the thinking behind it is catching on. The idea is that local governments should have emergency responders with a variety of skills, and that armed police officers may not be the best people to send to every disturbance.

Well, Oklahoma City is reporting that its police department has seen a 57% drop in mental-health-related emergency calls in the past year. The reason? The city has a 988 hotline that connects people to mental-health specialists rather than police. 988 calls have sharply increased over the same period of time.


The Montana Supreme Court has agreed with a group of local teen-agers that the Montana Constitution's promise of "a clean and healthful environment" applies to climate change. It will be interesting to see what the specific implications of this ruling are.


I'm really enjoying Paul Krugman's post-NYT Substack blog. More and more it looks like the imprimatur of the august New York Times has been baggage that slowed Paul down.

In this column, he explains why "Health Insurance is a Racket". The money for Americans' healthcare coverage overwhelmingly depends on the government, whether we're talking about direct government programs like Medicare and Medicaid or employer-sponsored programs that are motivated by tax breaks. A lot of that money passes through private health insurance companies, and they rake off a chunk of it. But what value do they really add to the process?

Paul also explains why he hasn't supported Medicare for All proposals: They make economic sense, but they're political losers. Most Americans covered by employer-sponsored programs report that they are happy with their coverage. So:

anyone proposing a radical reform like Medicare for all is in effect saying to large numbers of voters, “We’re going to take away insurance that you like, that you believe works for you, and replace it with something different. It will be better! Trust us!”

Still, though, even people who aren't running on MfA proposals should be pointing out that our current system makes no sense. Something different really would be better.


To no one's surprise, making sports betting legal and advertising it relentlessly during televised sporting events has worsened the nation's gambling addiction problem.


According to the New York Post, Jeff Bezos is planning to spend $600 million on his second wedding. This is Gilded Age stuff.


Elon Musk isn't just pushing fascism in the US, but in Germany as well.

Elon Musk has caused outrage in Berlin after appearing to endorse the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland.

Musk, who has been named by Donald Trump to co-lead a commission aimed at reducing the size of the US federal government, wrote on his social media platform X: “Only the AfD can save Germany.”


Senator Dick Durbin interviews NCAA President (and former Republican Governor) Charlie Baker. Number of athletes competing in NCAA schools: 510,000. Number of those athletes known to be trans: 10.

That's what the panic has been about: 10 people out of 510,000. And I wonder: Do any of those 10 really qualify as unfair competition?


All my life I've been reading articles promising that the long-term solution to the world's energy problem is nuclear fusion. Well, maybe the long term is finally starting to get shorter.


Overall, it's been a crappy year. But at least we beat the murder hornets.

and let's close with something Christmasy

Dog owners in London put on an annual dog-centered nativity play. The little guy pictured above is playing an angel.

Monday, December 16, 2024

Solutions

Murder is never the answer. Murder is not a healthy response to corruption. But it is healthy for people to fear that if they kill people for greed, they will be unsafe. ... [T]he assassination of Brian Thompson is a wake-up call, a warning that if we don’t solve this problem politically, we may not have a choice about whether it’s solved with violence.

- Cory Doctorow

This week's featured post is "The ball is in Trump's court".

This week everybody was talking about the guy who killed the guy who killed people

On December 4, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down on the street in Manhattan. When I wrote last week, a manhunt for the killer was underway. It was probably a far more extensive manhunt than would happen if you or I were murdered, because this is America and some lives are valued above others. The Black Lives Matter movement has called attention to one end of that spectrum. This is the other end.

Wednesday police caught the guy the were looking for. The arrested suspect is Luigi Mangione. He left a short note explaining the attack, which I have not been able to find a full text of. The Economist reports:

What could have inspired the killing? Mr Mangione’s short note suggested a calculating desire to wreak revenge on America’s health-care system. America, he correctly noted, has the most expensive health care in the world, but life expectancy has stagnated. “Many have illuminated the corruption and greed” in the system, he wrote. “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

UNH's pushback against the support received by the shooter hasn't gone very well. An in-house video distributed to UNH employees leaked to the internet, and was scorched by comments from people whose lives have been affected by denied claims.

The most insightful commentary I've seen on this situation is by Cory Doctorow, who published a short story with a similar theme (people killing executives of companies that had harmed them) several years ago. So he had been thinking about this for a long time before it actually happened. He puts his finger on precisely why so many Americans hate health insurance companies in general and UNH in particular (because it is the worst of the lot): They routinely kill people for money.

Doctorow goes through UNH branch by branch and explains how each one kills people for money. And he expresses his general amazement not that the Thompson assassination happened, but that such killings don't happen more often.

I don’t want people to kill insurance executives, and I don’t want insurance executives to kill people. But I am unsurprised that this happened. Indeed, I’m surprised that it took so long. It should not be controversial to note that if you run an institution that makes people furious, they will eventually become furious with you.

America is a place swimming in guns. Disgruntled Americans routinely shoot up venues that symbolize their unhappiness and despair: workplaces, schools, and so on. Why has it taken them so long to get to health insurance executives whose policies kill their loved ones?

The Buddhist corner of my brain reminds me that Thompson was a human being, and that all human beings deserve compassion. He undoubtedly had loved ones who will miss him dearly, and they deserve compassion too. But you know, the list of people deserving my compassion is long right now, and I don't think I'll get to Thompson or his family for quite a while. In the meantime, his heirs should take satisfaction in the millions of dollars he made by killing people.

I also suspect that Luigi Mangione will turn out to be no hero. But in some sense that doesn't matter.

Here's a quote I heard years ago and never traced to its source: Good karma is cost effective. That's a further point Doctorow makes in different words. Maybe executives could spend less on guards and panic rooms if they gave people less reason to want to do them violence. Maybe corporations could spend less on public relations if they didn't raise so much legitimate public hatred. Maybe executives could live freer happier lives with less money if they stopped being such monsters.


Adam Parkhomenko:

When right-wing scum tried to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, Republicans made excuses.

When a lunatic beat Paul Pelosi with a hammer, they made jokes.

And when Trump sent a mob to attack the Capitol, they made up lies.

Don’t lecture us about condemning violence.


Meanwhile, Trump and Vance took newly acquitted killer Daniel Perry to the Army-Navy game.

and bowing to the new overlord

There's some debate over whether Senator Ernst is folding her opposition to Pete Hegseth or just temporizing until the FBI either validates the accusations against him or clears him. "I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources." is only an endorsement if the truth favors Hegseth.

Meanwhile, retired priest Father Nathan Monk analyzes Hegseth's controversial tattoos. J. D. Vance has tried to spin the reaction against those tattoos as anti-Christian bias, but Monk disagrees.

Alt-right accounts often utilize Crusader memes as ways to threaten violence without explicitly stating it. This has resulted in a resurgence of the use of symbols associated with the Crusades by Christian Nationalist groups, including the Crusader's Cross and the phrase Deus Vult. ... If [Hegseth] were a Roman Catholic, I think it would be hard to place him in the hate speech category, because there is a complicated history with the Jerusalem cross. It might have been a symbol he was accustomed to or had some major significance. However, that is not the case. These are not symbols of his Protestant upbringing or linked to any history or heritage, past or present, but symbols of the Crusaders that are heavily being used by Christian Nationalists to promote violence and hatred. ...

This isn’t a case of his faith being called into question but his beliefs of supremacy, superiority, and sovereignty being actively called out by other Christians who are tired of the Prince of Peace yet again being used as a weapon of war against the very types of people Jesus called us to love.


ABC settled a defamation suit with Trump, which they probably would have won. At the very least, Trump would have been deposed under oath, which I'm sure he was anxious to avoid. In the settlement, ABC will pay $15 million to a "presidential foundation and museum", pay another million for Trump's attorney fees, and issue an apology.

Knowing the history of Trump and charities, I expect a big chunk of the $15 million to wind up in his pocket.


Michelle Goldberg:

I'm trying to put my finger on what's happening with this great capitulation to Trump -- ABC News, Chris Wray, the Democrats signing up to work with DOGE, Mark Benioff, etc. It's like you can feel the air going out of an entire social order.


Big tech companies lined up to give $1 million each to Trump's inaugural fund.

His 2017 inauguration was rife with corruption, ultimately resulting in a $750K settlement with the DC attorney general.


This is one small step in the Orbanization of America:

Yesterday I pulled overt references of queerness off my site, my very successful store that sells my books that have queer main characters. Because a few days ago, Meta emailed saying my advertising on their platform will be restricted - my site was categorized as "sexuality and gender identity."

I don't necessarily blame Novae Caelum for doing this, because this is the new world: If you want stay in business, even the business of writing novels with queer characters, you need to trim your sails a little. Stories like this won't ever rise to the mass media's attention, but there will be thousands of them.

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A heartbreaking story in yesterday's NYT: Jaime Cachua is a 33-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant who came to Rome, Georgia before his first birthday. He has no memories of Mexico, is not in contact with any relatives there, and speaks Spanish badly. He is married to an American citizen and they have 7-year-old twins who are citizens because they were born here. By all accounts, he is a productive member of a small-town society.

He’d lived all but the first year of his life in Rome, a riverside town of 40,000 in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. He was a customer service specialist at the local car dealership, a worship team volunteer at church and the host of family barbecues in his neighborhood cul-de-sac.

But Rome is Trump territory, and if Trump keeps his promises, Jaime will be deported to a country where he knows no one. Rome is represented in Congress by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who says she can't wait for the mass deportations to start. Jaime's closest friends, even Sky, the man who considers Jaime a surrogate son, voted for Trump.

Jaime's conversations with Sky are surreal in the way that so many conversations with Trump supporters are: Sky simply doesn't believe that what is happening is happening. Trump just wants to deport all the bad Mexicans, and Jaime is a good Mexican. Of course he'll be fine. Sky never explains how he thinks millions of people can be deported "very quickly" while paying close attention to the nuances of each case.


Another situation where the implementation details will matter is the 1-6 pardons Trump keeps promising. Are we talking about people who got swept up in the crowd and walked through doors already broken down? Or about the people who broke those doors? Or the people who battled police to get into a position to break down the doors? What about planners like Enrique Tarrio or Stewart Rhodes, who were convicted of seditious conspiracy?

It's important to remind people that none of the 1-6 convicts were sent to jail for supporting Trump, which has never been a crime and shouldn't be. They were convicted of breaking specific laws.

Similarly, they weren't convicted by the media or by Democrats. They were convicted by juries of their peers, who heard evidence from both sides and unanimously decided that they were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.


South Korea failed in its first attempt to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, who briefly declared martial law two weeks ago, but Saturday they got it done. 12 members of Yoon's party flipped against him, and that was enough for the needed 2/3 majority of the Parliament.

The spotlight will now move to the country’s constitutional court, whose six justices must vote unanimously in favor to uphold parliament’s decision. Yoon will now be suspended from office while the court deliberates. It has 180 days to rule on Yoon’s future. If it approves the motion, South Koreans must elect a new president within 60 days of its ruling.


A new government is forming in Syria, after the previous tyrant escaped to Moscow. NBC News analyzes "How Syria’s Bashar al-Assad fell so quickly". It will be a while before we really know what to think. Many Americans were optimistic back when Fidel Castro overthrew Cuba's previous tyrant or the ayatollahs replaced Iran's Shah.


Paul Krugman has retired from his NYT column, but he has shifted his energy to a Substack blog "Paul Krugman wonks out", which is more focused on his specialty, economics. In this post from Friday, he points out that Trump's desire for both a trade surplus and foreign capital coming to America violates arithmetic. The number of dollars in foreign hands is finite (i.e. dollars can only be created by the Fed in the US), and foreigners can either buy US products with their dollars or invest them in US assets. They can't do both with the same dollars.


President Macron has appointed a new French prime minister, Francois Bayrou, following a vote of no confidence in the previous government. Bayrou has a deep hole to dig himself out of. He first needs to assemble a new cabinet that draws majority support in the French Parliament, and then get a new budget passed.

and let's close with something big

Lots of people have advent calendars this time of year. But nobody has one as big as Gengenbach in Germany.

The Bible tells the story of Jesus' birth, and many elements of traditional Christmas celebrations originate there: a manger scene, wise men, shepherds, angels, and so on. But nothing in the Bible anticipates Christmas as a holiday, let alone one with gatherings of the extended family and huge feasts. (Mary and Joseph spent the first Christmas in a stable far away from their relatives. I doubt they ate well.)

In particular, the Christmas-anticipating season of Advent is wholly non-Biblical. It seems to have originated in Europe in the fourth century. Advent calendars first appeared in the 19th century in Germany. They were still catching on in the US when President Eisenhower was shown opening one with his grandchildren in 1953. The first chocolate-filled Advent calendars appeared in the 1950s.

But Germany still does it best: Every year, the town of Gengenbach turns its entire town hall into a giant Advent calendar.

Every evening, they raise the shade of another window to reveal a new picture behind it, just as the owner of an Advent calendar unfolds a flap to procure a candy — or these days, a lipstick or a spice sachet.

"It's quite spectacular because everything gets dark and then we have a spot on the window and then it's like a little bit of a curtain that goes up," said Michael Foell of Gengenbach's tourism bureau. "Everyone is just watching with big eyes and mouths open."

Monday, December 9, 2024

Promises

"I'll quit drinking if you let me run the Pentagon" is the most alcoholic thing anybody has ever said.

- frequent social media comment

This week's featured post is: "The Power of 'Again'".

This week everybody was talking about instability abroad

The 54-year regime of the Assad family in Syria is no more, and Assad himself is in Moscow. The main victorious rebel group used to be part of al Qaeda, so they may not be the good guys either.

The general situation -- which I imagine she hopes also applies to Putin's government in Russia -- was well described by Kira Rudik of the Ukrainian Parliament:

First, regimes fall very slowly, and nobody believe they are collapsing. And then, regimes fall fast.


Speaking of fast, Tuesday night South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, but Koreans who went to bed early slept through the whole thing. He made his announcement about 10:30 p.m. and reversed course by 4 a.m.

Yoon's declaration looked like a typical coup announcement:

The decree banned all political activities and limited media freedom. It was the first use of such emergency powers since the country’s military dictatorship fell in the late 1980s.

But it didn't last.

The counter-reaction came swiftly. Thousands of protesters took to the streets chanting “Arrest him!” The mood was one of outrage mixed with utter shock. ... Political opposition to Mr Yoon mobilised throughout the night. The DP called the president’s declaration “essentially a coup”. Han Dong-hoon, the head of Mr Yoon’s own People’s Power Party (PPP) came out against the move. As heavily armed troops stormed the parliament, the 190 lawmakers who had barricaded themselves inside the chamber, a majority of the 300-strong body, voted unanimously to revoke the president’s decree just two hours after it took effect. The armed forces began to leave shortly afterwards.

Saturday, a vote to impeach Yoon failed. Impeachment requires a 2/3 vote, and the opposition party has only 192 of the 300 seats. Ruling when that large a majority wants you gone doesn't seem like a stable situation, but Im not sure where it goes from here.


Wednesday, the French Parliament passed a motion of no confidence in the government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier after only 12 weeks. It is a political blow to President Macron, who will need to nominate a new prime minister acceptable to the Assembly.

and the plutocracy

Wednesday the CEO of United Healthcare was gunned down in the center of Manhattan while walking across the street from his hotel to another hotel where he was scheduled to address an investors' conference.

The attack looks planned, but police haven't caught the guy or publicly identified him yet, so any speculation about his motive is necessarily shaky. (Though apparently the bullets had words written on them: "delay", "deny", and "depose", which apparently have denial-of-coverage associations.) But I will note this, which I can observe on my own social media feed: There's remarkably little sympathy for the CEO.

UNH is the health insurance company that denies the most claims, by a wide margin. If the assassin turns out to be someone who lost a loved one because UNH wouldn't pay for care, he's going to become a hero to some substantial segment of the population. I'm reminded of how during the Depression bank robber John Dillinger became "a folk hero to Americans disillusioned with failing banks and the ineffective federal government".

As Maureen Tkacik notes at The American Prospect:

Only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO.

The article goes on to describe Medicare Advantage -- the privatized part of Medicare -- as "ensconced in fraud".

UnitedHealth, which insures close to a third of the nation’s MA patients, is to a great extent the architect of this vast privatization project, which has in recent years become the undisputed profit center of both the insurance giant and the American health care industry generally. ... UnitedHealth has been a particular trailblazer in the art of managing “risk” by simply denying claims for treatments and procedures it unilaterally deems unnecessary.

Princeton sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci writes in the NYT:

I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.

She also makes an extended comparison between the present and another era of US history marked by an extreme gap between rich and poor, as well as a surge in political violence: the Gilded Age.

In his blog The ReFrame, A. R. Moxon contrasts the response to CEO Bryan Thompson's murder to the death of Jordan Neely, a homeless man strangled on the New York subway. He notes how violent death is discussed differently when the victim is prominent.

Everyone involved in both stories is a human being, unless you ask our society—the parts of it where power is negotiated and narratives of permission are generated, anyway. In the corridors of power, the halls of justice, on platforms of influence, some people in our society are clearly deemed to be human beings— their lives justified, their potential valuable, their deaths tragedies—while others are deemed to be nothing more than a danger, a drain, a discomfort, a problem to be solved by making them not exist quite so much. The primary dividing line appears to be whether you've got money, or, failing that, whether you can make somebody money.

I am neither advocating terrorism nor planning any myself, but the Powers That Be need to recognize how consistently they've been shutting down nonviolent paths towards justice. (Trump's election, and the subsequent demise of any consequences for his law-breaking, is not the main reason, but it puts the cherry on the sundae.) As JFK said: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."


Meanwhile, how did Elon Musk get into a position to slash your Social Security? Simple: He bought his way in.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the final months of this year’s election to help Donald J. Trump win the presidency, federal filings revealed on Thursday.

That's just the raw total of dollars Musk spent to boost Trump. It doesn't count the in-kind contribution of his X/Twitter platform which he turned into a propaganda arm of the Trump campaign.

Axios makes the case the Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter -- which has become a disaster according to the ordinary way corporate takeovers are judged -- is actually paying off for him, due to the political power it has allowed him to accumulate, particularly if he can use that power to boost his other businesses. But if you are one of the unfortunate investors who went in with him, looking to grow the value of Twitter, too bad for you.

This is a pattern we see all too often: The Right makes false claims against liberal institutions and individuals in order to justify doing those very things when they're in a position to do so. Biden was not elected via some conspiracy of Facebook, Twitter, and various Soros-funded organizations in 2020, as Trump often claimed. But through X and his vast political spending, Musk definitely put a thumb on the electoral scale in 2024.

Jay Kuo discusses the unethical campaign tactics Musk funded, including false-positive ads, where Muslims would be micro-targeted for an ad that appeared to be for Jews, praising Kamala Harris for her Zionism, while Jews were micro-targeted with ads that appeared to be for Muslims and praised her willingness to cut off arms shipments to Israel.

This tactic goes back at least to Edwin O'Connor's classic political novel The Last Hurrah published in 1956. In it, old Boston pols reminisce about the old days, when you might send a fake Catholic priest to canvass for your opponent in a Protestant neighborhood.


Owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is doing his best to ruin The Los Angeles Times. He intervened during the campaign to stop his newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris and running a series criticizing Trump. His most recent idea is to incorporate an AI bias-meter into news stories, with the idea of making the paper more "fair and balanced". His "combative" interview with Oliver Darcy gives us an indication of what that might mean.

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, believes it is an "opinion," not a matter of fact, that Donald Trump lies at a higher rate than most other politicians.

"A lot of politicians lie a lot," Soon-Shiong declared to me on the phone Tuesday evening, pushing back against the assertion that Trump is an abnormality in American politics.

In his explanation of why he has resigned from the LAT, Senior Legal Columnist Harry Litman (who I know as a contributor to MSNBC) takes a different view:

[T]he idea of balance is fundamentally misplaced when on one side of the balance is a sociopathic liar like Donald Trump. ... In that context, the bromide of just being balanced is a terrible dereliction of journalists’ first defining responsibility of reporting the truth. Soon-Shiong apparently would have the Times deliver an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand presentation to readers. But there is no “other hand.” Trump is an inveterate liar, and journalists have a defining responsibility to call that out.

and the Hunter pardon

When I wrote last week, President Biden's pardon of his son Hunter was fairly recent. But now that I've had a chance to read many opinions on it, I feel like I got it right the first time: It would be nice to be able to draw a clear moral line between Biden's use of pardons and Trump's, but if I had a son I wouldn't sacrifice him to achieve that goal.

Hunter has committed a few fairly minor crimes and has already been over-prosecuted for them by a Trump-appointed special prosecutor that Biden left in place. Investigations by partisan House committees repeatedly over-promised what they could prove against Hunter, producing a lot of click-bait headlines in right-wing media, but little else. Four more years of Hunter investigations and/or prosecutions would be a miscarriage of justice.

I don't see the new administration being restrained by the precedents of past administrations, so I think the impact of Biden restraining his mercy would have been mainly rhetorical. And I'll make a prediction along those lines: If the GOP needs to break a filibuster to achieve one of its goals -- a national abortion ban, say -- the fact that Democrats preserved the filibuster when they had the majority will mean nothing.

Here's the WaPo's Ann Telnaes' comment on Speaker Johnson's double standard:

Meanwhile, Ron Filipkowski:

Virtually every question today at the WH Press briefing was about the Hunter pardon, as if that is the thing the American people care about most right now. The DC press is so disconnected from the American public and serves them poorly more often than not.

and you also might be interested in ...

Can you imagine the response if Biden had proposed selling gold out of Fort Knox to bid up the price of his political allies' products? Well, that's what the Bitcoin Reserve Bill would do if passed:

Four days later, Sen [Cynthia] Lummis [of Wyoming] introduced to the 118th Congress the “Boosting Innovation, Technology, and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act of 2024”, or BITCOIN Act. The bill mandates that all bitcoin held by any Federal agency be transferred to the Treasury to be held in a strategic bitcoin reserve. In addition, it mandates that the Secretary of the Treasury purchase “not more than 200,000 Bitcoins per year over a 5-year period, for a total acquisition of 1,000,000 Bitcoins.” That 1,000,000 Bitcoins is then to be held by the Treasury for at least 20 years before they can consider selling it

Chris Hayes skewered this idea.


Covid deniers often claim that the pandemic death totals were overstated: Anybody who died with Covid supposedly was counted as dying of Covid, even if they got hit by a truck.

But the officially reported deaths are not the only way to access the death toll. There's also the demographic concept of excess deaths. Demographers are really good at looking at a population and predicting about how many people will die during normal times. (That's why life insurance is a reliable business rather than a crapshoot.) When something exceptional happens (like a war, a famine, or an epidemic), people die in greater numbers than demographers would ordinarily expect: In other words, excess deaths.

So that provides a way to check whether a pandemic is real or exaggerated. If doctors are misreporting ordinary deaths as pandemic deaths, then the reported deaths from the disease would be greater than the excess deaths. But in fact it goes the other way. Excess deaths during the pandemic were far higher than reported Covid deaths. So by that measure the Covid pandemic was far more deadly than previously thought.


Atlantic's Adam Serwer points out something I've been noticing also: MAGA wants to make heroes out of villains, or just plainly doesn't get that characters are villains. Tony Soprano, Walter White, Homelander, Judge Dredd -- these are not good people, and they were created as cautionary tales, not as heroes to emulate.


When Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" went to Mar-a-Lago a few weeks ago, I decided not to join the chorus of people calling them out. Maybe they weren't kissing the ring; I decided to wait and see.

Well, now we're seeing. They're bowing down. Wednesday, David Frum appeared on MJ to comment on the Pete Hegseth nomination, which was in trouble because of reports of his drinking -- the most recent being reports that colleagues at Fox News had been worried about him. Frum gave a substantive comparison of Hegseth to a failed defense secretary nominee from 1989: John Tower, who was similarly reported to drink excessively. Frum segued into his commentary by quipping "If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed."

After Frum had been excused, Brzezinski came on to apologize to Fox News. Frum responded in The Atlantic:

It is a very ominous thing if our leading forums for discussion of public affairs are already feeling the chill of intimidation and responding with efforts to appease.

Thursday morning, Scarborough began the show with what TV Insider described as a "20 minute rant" and Dan Fromkin called "whiny" and "defensive", denying that he or the show was afraid of Trump, and defending again the trip to Mar-a-Lago.

Fromkin observed that there is no journalistic reason to have an off-the-record conversation with Trump.

Going off the record with a source is a compact and a sign of respect. You grant a source anonymity on the assumption that you will get valuable information in return. But Trump holds nothing back in public. Nothing he says off the record will be revelatory. Certainly nothing will be revelatory and true. Nothing will suddenly give you a better “read on the man.”

So what is it then? It’s bending the knee. It’s obedience.

and let's close with something unexpectedly awesome

Just this weekend, I bought tickets for only my second post-Covid airline trip. I went out of my way to get non-stop flights, because getting stuck in airports is not a high-value experience. At least not most of the time.

But then there's the Jewel at Singapore's Changi airport, which apparently has become a tourist attraction in itself. Why can't my country have nice things?

Monday, December 2, 2024

Weak Points

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

- George Orwell, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" (1946)

I have admired the quote above for years, but it wasn't until yesterday that I looked up the larger context. Often, well-loved quotes are taken out of context, and were never really intended to say what we hear in them today, so reading the whole paragraph or page or chapter can ruin the effect. But the context of this quote makes it even more relevant to the present moment:

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.

This week's featured post is "Resisting, eventually". It describes my election hangover, and a corresponding unwillingness to commit to a resistance strategy, or even research one adequately.

This week everybody was still talking about Trump's nominations

Now that Matt Gaetz is gone, the next nominee likely to fall is Pete Hegseth, chosen by Trump to run the Pentagon. We've known for two weeks that he paid a woman to drop her accusation of sexual assault in 2017, but a single episode of sexual assault is almost a badge of honor in TrumpWorld, so his nomination was still viable.

But then Friday, the NYT published an email Hegseth received from his mother in 2018:

You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth. ... … On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself

Sunday, The New Yorker detailed a history of Hegseth's alcohol abuse and financial impropriety in addition to a pattern of sexual harassment. He headed two veteran-focused political groups, and each time was dismissed after overspending the organization's funds for drunken staff parties. Hegseth's drunken exploits include trying to get up on stage with the dancers at a strip club, and on several occasions being carried up to his room by co-workers.

The Republican senators whose votes Hegseth needs are probably impervious to sexual-assault claims, since they've already had to make so many excuses for Donald Trump's behavior. "Don't believe women" could be the party motto at this point. But a Defense Secretary who is often drunk and out-of-control is a different problem. From the New Yorker article:

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut and the senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, described the report of Hegseth’s drinking as alarming and disqualifying. In a phone interview, Blumenthal, who currently leads the Senate committee that will review Hegseth’s nomination, told me, “Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure.” Blumenthal went on, “It’s dangerous. The Secretary of Defense is involved in every issue of national security. He’s involved in the use of nuclear weapons. He’s the one who approves sending troops into combat. He approves drone strikes that may involve civilian casualties. Literally life-and-death issues are in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, and entrusting these kinds of issues to someone who might be incapacitated for any reason is a risk we cannot take.”

It would be bad enough if Hegseth were the kind of drunk who just quietly falls asleep. But the stories about him point to a drunk who loses inhibitions and does stupid things.


The hits keep coming. Trump's nominee for FBI director is Kash Patel, whose main qualification is a slavish devotion to Trump.

The pattern here is something we often see from the Right: Democrats are falsely accused of something so that Republicans can "respond" by actually doing that very thing. In this case, the "something" is weaponizing the Justice Department. (The archetypal example is Fox News, whose right-wing bias parallels a grossly exaggerated notion of left-wing media bias. A completely different example is the Florida education system, which Governor DeSantis is turning into the indoctrination program he falsely claimed it already was. "DeSantis’s anti-education crusade is doubly authoritarian – most obviously in its use of state power to suppress ideas and information, but also in its more subtle assumption that teaching is ultimately about imposing doctrines of one sort or another.")

The Biden Justice Department was not weaponized. Every Trump investigation began with probable cause for suspecting an actual crime, and every indictment was backed by evidence that probably would have led to convictions if Trump-favoring judges had allowed the cases to go to trial. That's law enforcement, not weaponization.

But a Patel-led FBI and a Bondi-led Justice Department won't bother with niceties like probable cause and proof beyond reasonable doubt. Look for people to be investigated because they are Trump critics, and for rumors of wide-ranging conspiracies to regularly leak to Fox News. Most of these investigations won't lead to indictments, or even identification of the specific laws supposedly violated. Those that do will produce show trials that juries quickly dismiss with not-guilty verdicts.

The Durham investigation from Trump's first term is the model here. Trump claimed it would uncover "the crime of the century", and right-wing media regularly gave credence to Durham-inspired conspiracy theories that led to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But only minor figures went to trial, and they were charged with minor offenses falling far short of the vast conspiracies Durham was supposed to reveal. Only two went to trial, and they were quickly acquitted.

Such prosecutions have three goals: generating a series of enraging headlines inside the right-wing echo chamber, making targets spend vast sums of money on lawyers, and intimidating people who fear falling out of Trump's favor.


It's hard to sort out the pluses and minuses of Biden's pardon of his son Hunter. Undoubtedly, we will hear about this every time Trump makes a self-interested pardon, which he will do often, beginning with the January 6 rioters and seditionists.

But it's also clear that a Bondi/Patel Justice Department would never leave Hunter alone. His father let the Trump-appointed prosecutor do whatever he wanted, with the result that Hunter was prosecuted far more intensely than an ordinary person who committed the same offenses would have been.

Biden is anticipating injustice from the Trump administration and acting to avert it. It would be better to wait for the injustice to begin, so that it's obvious to everyone, but by then his power to mitigate it would have evaporated. He had to act now or not at all.

The larger cause of democracy probably would have been better served if Biden had been willing to sacrifice his son to it. (I'll let you decide whether there's a Christian metaphor worth inserting here.) But I don't blame him for not letting that happen.


This account of budget-director-nominee and Project 2025 author Russell Vought is genuinely scary. Basically, he believes we're in a "post-constitutional" situation. Our government has drifted so far from what he thinks the Constitution calls for that extra-constitutional presidential authority is needed to pull us back.

and Russia and its ally Syria

The Biden administration imposed a truly biting sanction on Russian banks two weeks ago, leading to this:

Against a backdrop of high inflation and fears over the value of the currency, Russia’s central bank has already lifted interest rates to 21% this year.

We'll learn a lot about the state of the world in January, when we see whether Trump starts relaxing Russian sanctions. If he does, and he doesn't get some major concession in return, we can be pretty sure that the rumors of kompromat are true.


It also looks like a bad time to be a Russian ally. Rebels in Syria have taken Aleppo, the country's second-largest city, with surprising ease. The Assad regime, which was propped up by Russian intervention when it seemed to be falling over a dozen years ago, now has few allies it can count on: Russia pulled its troops out to fight in Ukraine, while Iran and its various proxy groups have their hands full dealing with Israel.

Meanwhile, the former Soviet nation of Georgia has seen days of massive demonstrations against the ruling party, which has been leaning towards Russia and away from joining the EU.

and tariff skirmishes

This week included a major reminder of what a Trump administration is like. Trump will troll us by threatening to do something, get some kind of response from the targets of his threats, falsely claim that the response is a concession, and do a victory lap for "winning" the exchange. Nothing has actually happened, but he has exhausted his opponents and given his followers a fake "victory" to crow about.

Trump loves tariffs, because this is the area where presidential power is its most authoritarian. Congress has largely delegated this part of its taxing power to the President -- something the Supreme Court should (but won't) look at in view of its emerging non-delegation doctrine -- so he really can just decree something and see it happen.

Past presidents have used the tariff power for economic purposes: If we don't like how a country treats our exports, we'll put a tariff on their exports to us. Most of the time this has been a warning shot to induce another country to negotiate. But Trump views tariffs in a far more expansive way: If we don't like anything another country does, we can punish them by taxing their goods. (Of course, the tax will be paid by the American consumer, but it should hurt the targeted country's sales.)

So last Monday Trump tweeted that he would impose 25% across-the-board tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada unless they solve our immigration and drug problems.

This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!

He then had a conversation with the Mexican president, who told him that Mexico is already doing what he asked for (as part of an agreement negotiated by Biden). Trump then claimed victory. Does that mean the tariffs won't happen? Who can say?

Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau also talked with Trump, but the outcome was less clear.

David Atkins summarized what I've been thinking:

The next four years are in large part going to be Trump taking credit for what Biden and Harris already did.

Inflation is headed down, fentanyl deaths are down, border apprehensions are down -- in a few months we're going to hear Trump claim all these accomplishments as his own.

and you also might be interested in ...

ProPublica has been reporting on women with problem pregnancies who have died because state abortion bans delayed their emergency treatment. (In general, life-of-the-mother exceptions are too narrow. Problems that don't seem immediately life-threatening can go south faster than doctors can react.) You might think that the states would respond by issuing new treatment guidelines to keep similar deaths from happening in the future, but their response is going in a different direction entirely: They're making it harder for the public to learn about such cases.

In other words, dead women is bad optics, not bad policy.


Paul Waldman points out something that's been bugging me too: Critiques of Kamala Harris' campaign or the Democratic message in general don't have much to do with the actual campaign or message. He's not arguing that everything was great and no changes are needed,

But if you want to alter your strategy in effective ways, you have to begin with a clear understanding of reality. Which is why it’s important to puncture some of the myths that keep getting repeated.

Short version: The election was very close, and not a groundswell repudiation of everything the Democrats stand for. Harris ran a centrist campaign rather than an identity-politics campaign. She focused her message on kitchen-table issues rather than culture-war issues. People can legitimately argue about why her message didn't get through to enough voters, but they shouldn't distort what her message actually was.


I continue to be skeptical of carbon-capture as a solution to climate change, but this piece of research does look promising.


They're sad and depressing, but you should check out the comments on this Jess Piper post to BlueSky:

What does a defunded school look like?

A constant turnover of new teachers because of the pay rate. No science lab. No band. No track. No real cafeteria, just a warming center for pre-packaged foods. No school nurse. A lack of bus drivers and AP/dual credit classes.

Ask me how I know…


Oklahoma and Texas can mandate that schools teach the Bible, but to get the results Christian nationalists are aiming for, eventually they're going to have to specify who teaches the Bible and how.

and let's close with something colorful

In my father-in-law's final days, my wife was managing his affairs, so his mail came to us. He died years ago and we've moved twice since, but somehow we still get fund-raising letters from a few of the bizarre-to-us Catholic organizations he supported. The mailings, when we don't just toss them unopened, can offer a glimpse into a different world.

At the most basic level, fund-raising letters are all the same no matter who they come from. Whether the bogeyman is Trump, the Deep State, or the Elders of Zion, somebody is doing something terrifying that there is still time to head off if you send money.

Recently a mailing from America Needs Fatima in Hanover, PA warned us about "the growth of Satanism and its expanding legion of followers" -- who never contact me despite all the weird web sites I wander through while I'm doing research for this blog. My wife collects Tarot decks, which seems like it should have put the Mark of the Beast on our mailbox a long time ago. But nothing.

Anyway, the growth of Satanism in general is too vague a development for a truly scary mailing, so ANF found something more specific: WalMart is helping the Satanists target America's children.

"How?" you might ask. Well, the WalMart web site (not the stores, apparently) offers a "Satanist" coloring book: Let's Summon Demons: A Creepy Coloring & Activity Book.

My first thought was that ANF was making this up, but journalism requires fact-checking, so I went to the WalMart web site and found it: available for $12.04.

HOME ALONE? PART OF AN OTHERWORLDLY CULT? Whether coloring alone or having fun together with others equally versed in the occult, paranormal, and witchcraft, this is the PERFECT coloring and activity book to pass the time until the great [your chaotic primordial god here] descends.

Sounds pretty serious, don't you think? It's also at Amazon, for the same $12.04, whose numerological significance escapes me. (BTW: I question the author's magical technique: The boy in the cover drawing is breaking the summoning circle.)

Might your unsuspecting-but-curious child happen across this by accident while browsing for other kinds of indoctrination? Not likely. I scrolled through many screens worth of WalMart-offered coloring books and didn't find it. Technically WalMart classifies it under "Other". Amazon says it's "Novelty".

However, if your child is already versed in summoning the occult via Google (as I just did), anything can happen.

And once they find it, they will know the name Steven Rhodes, through which they can conjure the Threadless marketing site, full of t-shirts, posters, and other products spawned by the same dark-and-twisted sense of humor. This would be a totally inappropriate place to look for Christmas gifts for your friends, so I recommend you stay away from it.

Don't thank me for that warning. Thank America Needs Fatima.