"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?
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