Monday, November 22, 2021

Where We're Headed

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on December 6.

There’s still plenty of reason to fear where we are currently headed, but at the same time, there’s no reason to think that five years from now, at the next major Paris “stocktake,” we’ll still be headed there.

- David Roberts, "Don't get too bummed out about COP26"

This week's featured post is "Does the Red Pill have an antidote?"

This week everybody was talking about the Rittenhouse verdict

The 18-year-old vigilante was found not guilty on all counts.

I worry about the lessons people are learning from this verdict. As for Rittenhouse himself, I can't guess. It's possible that he was genuinely horrified to see people die at his own hand. Many stories tell of young men who were excited to go to war, and yet were traumatized to learn up close what it means to kill another human being. We can hope Rittenhouse responds similarly, and that even as he walks free, he is determined to avoid violence in the future.

On the other hand, he may have learned that killing makes you a hero, and has lasting negative consequences only for the people who die. If that's the case, he will likely kill again.

https://www.gocomics.com/lukey-mcgarrys-tldr/2021/11/20

As for the violent conservative movement that has lionized Rittenhouse, I have little doubt that they have been emboldened. Killing protesters is a widespread and longstanding fantasy on the Right. Until now, hitting them with a car has been the preferred method. But the Rittenhouse case established that you can walk up to protesters with a gun, and if they worry that you might be a mass shooter and try to disarm you, you can kill them in "self defense". I'm sure we'll see more of that. No doubt at this very moment, militia groups are holding training sessions on the loopholes in self-defense laws.

David French:

Most of the right-wing leaders voicing their admiration for Rittenhouse are simply adopting a pose. On Twitter, talk radio, and Fox News, hosts and right-wing personalities express admiration for Rittenhouse but know he was being foolish. They would never hand a rifle to their own children and tell them to walk into a riot. They would never do it themselves.

But these public poses still matter. When you turn a foolish young man into a hero, you’ll see more foolish young men try to emulate his example. And although the state should not permit rioters to run rampant in America’s streets, random groups of armed Americans are utterly incapable of imposing order themselves, and any effort to do so can lead to greater death and carnage.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened in Rittenhouse’s case. He didn’t impose order. He didn’t stop a riot. He left a trail of bodies on the ground, and two of the people he shot were acting on the belief that Rittenhouse himself was an active shooter. He had, after all, just killed a man.

Farhad Manjoo amplifies that last point, noting that the Rittenhouse shootings "unravel some of the foundational tenets of gun advocacy".

That guns are effective and necessary weapons of self-defense. That without them, lawlessness and tyranny would prevail. And that in the right hands — in the hands of the “good guys” — guns promote public safety rather than destroy it.

In the Rittenhouse case, none of that was true. At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it. The gun transformed situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street. And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself — he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon.

This is self-defense as circular reasoning: Rittenhouse says he carried a rifle in order to guarantee his safety during a violent protest. He was forced to shoot at four people when his life and the lives of other people were threatened, he says. What was he protecting everyone from? The gun strapped to his own body, the one he’d brought to keep everyone safe.

I am struck by the fact that the only people who died in the Kenosha riots were the ones Rittenhouse killed. He was the primary danger.

https://www.politico.com/cartoons/2021/11/18/the-nations-cartoonists-on-the-week-in-politics-000267?slide=9

The legal wrangling over this case is likely not over. A civil lawsuit for wrongful death is a possibility, though Jonathan Turley warns against it. There's also a disagreement over the vast sums of money raised for Rittenhouse's defense. The state will return his $2 million bail, but to whom? Rittenhouse himself? His lawyers? The fund-raisers?

Turley is also skeptical that Rittenhouse can win a defamation lawsuit for all the negative things people have said about him.

and Paul Gosar

who was censured by the House and expelled from his committees on Wednesday.

The vote was close to splitting on party lines: Among Republicans, only established anti-MAGA representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger voted for the censure.

Republicans like Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy complained that by taking away Gosar's committee assignments the censure resolution went too far. But (as so often happens) they offered no counter-proposal. I can find no suggestion that Republicans other than Cheney and Kinzinger were willing to reprimand Gosar in any way. Speaker Pelosi waited ten days for the GOP caucus to discipline its own member, and acted only when it was clear they would not.

I think AOC summed it up pretty well:

What is so hard about saying this is wrong? This is not about me. This is not about Rep. Gosar. This is about what we are willing to accept. ... If you believe that this behavior should not be accepted, then vote yes.

As many people have pointed out, no other workplace would tolerate this. If you posted a video depicting yourself killing a colleague you frequently disagreed with, you'd be fired.

Gosar defended himself by saying that it's just a cartoon. But if what Gosar did wasn't over the line, where is the line? What if he had superimposed his own and AOC's heads on a rape cartoon? What if the cartoon had been more realistic?

As we saw again and again during the Trump years, Republicans don't want to answer such questions. Democrats were always "overreacting" to Trump, but Republicans would not react at all, and would never speculate on how far they might let him go in the future. Ultimately, they saw him unleash a mob on Congress itself, and still did nothing.

The same moral cowardice is on display here: Kevin McCarthy knows the MAGA faction will eventually cross any line he might draw, and he won't want to respond then either. So he says nothing.

For his part, Gosar remained defiant. "I explained to [the Republican House caucus] what was happening. I did not apologize. I said this video didn’t have anything to do with harming anybody." After the censure, he reposted the offending video and then took it down again.


Gosar also suggests that Kyle Rittenhouse get a Congressional Medal of Honor "for selflessly protecting the lives and property of the people from an armed mob of arsonists and criminals". [I see the link no longer works, presumably because the tweet has been taken down. I had verified the tweet myself before trying to link to it.]

Bottom line: Like much of the far right, Gosar is pro-violence -- as long as people he likes are attacking people he doesn't like.


One reason McCarthy is such a pushover for the MAGA faction is that he fears he won't be named speaker if Republicans get the majority back in 2022. Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows appeared Thursday on Rep. Matt Gaetz' podcast and suggested that a new Republican House majority should bypass McCarthy and name Trump as speaker. (Only tradition says that the Speaker has to be a member of the House.)

Since Trump has no legislative agenda, I can only see two purposes in making him Speaker:

  • As Speaker, he could sabotage the country by blocking bills to fund the government or raise the debt ceiling.
  • Being Speaker would put him in the presidential line of succession, in case his violent followers could somehow get Biden and Harris out of the way. I'm sure Trump himself would never suggest such a thing, unless maybe he were "joking".

and Build Back Better

A version of the bill passed the House. What happens in the Senate is anybody's guess. Here's CNBC's speculation:

Multiple senators will push for changes to the bill’s provisions including paid leave and taxes along the way. Any tweaks will require another vote in the House, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can afford three defections (only one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, voted against the bill Friday). ...

[Senator Joe] Manchin, who has not publicly endorsed the package as he expresses concerns about spending and inflation, will seek at least one overhaul. He has signaled he will push to scrap a House provision offering four weeks of paid leave to most Americans.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is another Democrats who could seek to influence the bill in the Senate. She already shot down her party’s efforts to hike tax rates on the biggest businesses and wealthiest individuals, forcing lawmakers to opt for more complicated policies such as a minimum tax on corporations.

The open question in my mind is whether Manchin's and Sinema's votes are really available. If they are, some compromise will pass the Senate and go back to the House. But I can also imagine that at least one of them is just stringing out the process and will never get on board.


Kevin McCarthy delayed the House vote by unleashing a record-breaking eight hour and 32 minute speech. Unsurprisingly, much of what he said wasn't true.

and the pandemic

The recent surge in cases accelerated this week: the 7-day average of new cases per day is up to 93K from a recent low of 71K November 4. Hospitalizations have turned up as well: +6% in the last two weeks. Deaths are still falling, but not sharply: down 9%.

I speculated last week that vaccines and better treatment might keep the rise in cases from leading to a rise in deaths, but that's still uncertain. Typically there's a time lag between when cases start rising and when deaths start rising. The rise in hospitalizations is worrisome.


No, Anthony Fauci had nothing to do with a beagle experiment in Tunisia. Lots of people aren't even trying to tell the truth any more.

White Coat Waste spokesman Justin Goodman ... defended the decision to capitalize on the anti-Fauci fervor that has been brewing for more than a year and a half. “When you have such a high-profile person to point the finger at for funding animal experiments, it would be malpractice for us not to do that,” he said.

and climate change

David Roberts isn't as bummed about the COP26 meetings in Glasgow as many environmentalists seem to be. First, he says, you need to appreciate what these meetings are and aren't. They aren't legislatures.

[A] COP agreement can’t make a country do anything. ... The utility of the Paris process is that every few years it provides the equivalent of a giant camera flash, revealing where everyone stands. That is useful. International transparency and peer pressure can sometimes move national governments. But it is a mistake to invest any particular hopes for change in the UNFCCC process — it can’t really do anything. It can only illuminate what is being done.

What is being done currently isn't enough, but we're also not at the end of the story.

The good news is, we’re making progress. A decade ago, we were on track for 4° to 6° Celsius average warming by the end of the century, which would have been species-threatening.

As this report from Climate Action Tracker shows, thanks to actions taken by national governments since then, we have “bent the curve” on climate change, as it were, and brought the average expected warming down to 2.7°C.

That would still be devastating. But we’re not going to stop there. Progress is only accelerating. ... There’s still plenty of reason to fear where we are currently headed, but at the same time, there’s no reason to think that five years from now, at the next major Paris “stocktake,” we’ll still be headed there.

In parallel with a COP meeting, there's always "climate festival-cum-trade-show, featuring governments, nonprofits, and private-sector actors announcing all kinds of new campaigns and initiatives alongside the UNFCCC process". Roberts found this part of the meeting encouraging.

[N]ational governments are often going to be in the caboose of this train — civic groups, the private sector, and subnational governments are leading the way. That’s distributed all over the world, less easy to see and sum up, but it shows that the caution and intransigence of national governments are not the whole story.


A long article in yesterday's NYT examined how China got control of the vast cobalt supplies of the Congo, giving it a huge advantage in the battery technology needed by the electric cars that are the best hope for cutting CO2 emissions.

During the Cold War, US policy focused on keeping the Soviet Union from controlling Congo's natural resources. But after the Soviet government collapsed, interest in those resources waned under multiple administrations. In 2016, when a US company, Freeport-McMoRan, made bad investments in fossil fuels and needed to sell assets to pay down debt, only Chinese companies made bids. A second sale to China Molybdenum closed in 2020.

and you also might be interested in ...

https://ifunny.co/picture/thanksgiving-celebrating-the-day-americans-fed-undocumented-aliens-from-europe-e34USFF69

The Pollo Tropical restaurant chain in Florida came up with an ingenious solution to its labor shortage: It paid workers more.

[Parent company CEO Richard] Stockinger said Pollo Tropical had also offered hiring incentives and improved its benefits package by adding childcare leave, company-paid educational programs, and more affordable medical plans. These measures would help its restaurants "remain competitive in these challenging market conditions," he said.

The chain will compensate by raising prices.

Adam Smith would have predicted this supply-and-demand result, but it's funny how such stuff gets discussed in most of the media: When the fluctuations of the labor market go against workers, that's just how life is. But when they benefit workers, it's some kind of crisis.


Self-described socialist Fredrik deBoer makes some of the same observations I've been making for a while:

What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.

Looking at the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primary races, he observes that (whatever else might be said about the fairness of the process) Bernie Sanders didn't get as many votes as the candidates he lost to.

Whatever else we may want to say about the system, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the voters of the liberal party in American politics twice had the opportunity to nominate Mr. Sanders as their candidate for president and twice declined to do so. If we don’t allow this to inform our understanding of the popularity of our politics, we’ll never move forward and start winning elections to gain more power in our system.

This may be seen as a betrayal of the socialist principles I stand for, which are at heart an insistence on the absolute moral equality of every person and a fierce commitment to fighting for the worst-off with whatever social and governmental means are necessary. But I am writing this precisely because I believe so deeply in those principles. I want socialism to win, and to do that, socialists must be ruthless with ourselves. ... Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country.


Beau of the Fifth Column addresses a practical problem: how to convince your parents to get vaccinated. He suggests two arguments: First, find out whether they are afraid of some specific ingredient they think the vaccines contain. Probably that chemical isn't there at all. Second, point out that even if you believe the most exaggerated estimates of people who have vaccine side-effects, taking the vaccine is still safer than getting Covid.


The best-of-2021 lists have started appearing. The WaPo's best ten books is, as usual, humbling. I haven't read any of them.


Trump's mail-slowing postmaster general may finally be on his way out.


Department of I-can't-believe-somebody-had-to-prove-that-but-I-guess-they-did: The new book Homelessness is a Housing Problem looks at regional variations in the rate of homelessness, and concludes that the problem is high rents. Not drug abuse or mental illness or unemployment or any of the other frequently cited explanations.

If your community has a lot of homeless people, it should build more housing they can afford. It's really that simple.


Matt Yglesias points out a problem with the focus on social-justice language: A group like the AMA might adopt language changes and leave its inequality-producing policies in place.

[B]ecause doctors are perennially in such short supply in the United States, they can afford to be extremely choosy about their assignments. You never have a down-on-his-luck doctor looking for work and realizing that there’s demand for medical care in poor neighborhoods or rural communities. Even more subtly, because doctors are scarce, they can afford to treat their patients relatively poorly. ...

There are lots of ways to increase medical abundance, but unfortunately, the AMA is normally standing in the way — blocking increased scope of practice for nurses, making it hard for foreign-trained doctors to practice in the United States, and historically pushing to train too few doctors here at home.


I took this screenshot while browsing the NYT on Tuesday. In the view of the NYT opinion-page editors, four articles prophesying doom for the Democrats constitutes a "debate".


Speaking of the Democrats, they face two separate problems in 2022:

  • Getting people to vote for them.
  • Overcoming gerrymandering that could give Republicans a majority even if most voters choose Democrats.

Gerrymandering is getting worse, but recent Supreme Court decisions have closed off most avenues for challenging gerrymandered maps in court.


The Staples Center in LA is about to become the Crypto.com Arena. I am nostalgic for the era when the Lakers played in the Forum, the 76ers in the Spectrum, and the Celtics in the Boston Garden. As far as I know, Madison Square Garden in New York is the NBA's lone survivor of those simpler times. Now the New Orleans Pelicans play in the Smoothy King Center.

In his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace parodied the naming-rights-for-money trend with the notion of subsidized time. Events take place during the Year of Glad and the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment.

For decades, fans have been struggling to turn the ever-changing corporate names into something as charming as the traditional ones (like referring to the former Verizon Center in DC -- now the Capital One Arena -- as "the Phone Booth"). I hear Crypto.com is likely to be nicknamed "The Crypt", which doesn't bode well for the teams that will play there. Personally, I'd prefer to pretend it's named for Krypto the Superdog, and refer to it as the Dog House.

and let's close with something visual

As even amateur photographers know, it's hard to get the Moon to pose just the way you want.

from the Wikimedia Commons

Monday, November 15, 2021

Word and Deed

Since my first day in office, I have promised Justice Department employees that together we would show the American people by word and deed that the department adheres to the rule of law, follows the facts and the law and pursues equal justice under the law. Today’s charges reflect the department’s steadfast commitment to these principles.

- Merrick Garland
"Stephen K. Bannon Indicted for Contempt of Congress"

This week's featured posts is "Does America Need an Anti-Cancel Culture University?"

This week everybody was talking about Steve Bannon's indictment

https://twitter.com/BennettCartoons/status/1459309730900369408

Steve Bannon, a former adviser to a former president, was indicted Friday on two counts of contempt of Congress, each of which could lead to one year in prison. He surrendered today (frustrating my fantasy of a you'll-never-take-me-alive shootout).

The two counts stem from a subpoena issued by the January 6 Select Committee, and are for (1) failing to produce subpoenaed documents, and (2) failing to appear for a deposition. For the documents, there is at least an argument to make: Trump has claimed executive privilege on other coup-related documents, and while that claim is probably baseless, it is still wending its way through the courts. So Bannon's refusal is tenuously connected to someone else's meritless claim.

The failure to appear, though, has no conceivable justification. If he did testify, Bannon might credibly use executive privilege to justify refusing to answer specific questions about his conversations with Trump. But he also has his own behavior to answer for, as well as possible conversations with conspirators other than the defeated president. Simply knowing a former president does not immunize Bannon against any possible questioning by Congress, so his behavior is quite literally contemptuous.

Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has also refused to appear for questioning. His case is somewhat stronger, in that he was at least employed by the president at the time under investigation. But similarly, his proper course of action is to show up and invoke executive privilege on a question-by-question basis. (The model here is the way Mafia bosses invoked the Fifth Amendment at the 1951 Kefauver hearings. Chicago capo Tony Accardo pleaded the Fifth 170 times.) It can't possibly be true that everything he knows is privileged. Meadows undoubtedly had conversations with coup-friendly members of Congress, and allegedly met with organizers of the January 6 protests. There's no reason he shouldn't have to answer questions about those meetings.

The committee has not yet decided whether to recommend an indictment of Meadows, but I predict it will.

A related question is whether the Bannon indictment will make other subpoenaed witnesses more cooperative. We'll see.


An appeals court has delayed the January 6 Committee's access to Trump administration documents held in the National Archives, pending a hearing. Last week, a lower-court judge dismissed his executive privilege claim with a forceful statement that "presidents are not kings". Trump's lawyers argued his case as a separation-of-powers dispute between the executive and legislative branches of government, but the judge rejected that framing: President Biden represents the executive branch, and he agrees that Congress should get the documents. So the dispute is between the US government and a private citizen who was once president.

The hearing on Trump's appeal will start November 30.


Today's fun fact: I already knew NFL stars Nick and Joey Bosa are brothers, but until this week I didn't know they're Tony Accardo's great-grandsons. I'm sure the Big Tuna would be proud.

and race-related murder trials

https://www.facebook.com/robert.w.brunelle

Closing arguments in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial begin today. The judge dismissed the one charge that Rittenhouse had no defense against: a misdemeanor charge for possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18.

I haven't been watching this trial, largely because following it at a distance is upsetting enough. I find it impossible to imagine anyone taking his defense seriously if he were liberal and Black. Picture, say, a Black liberal taking an AR-15 to the January 6 riot, then shooting a few people when he started to feel threatened. I can't imagine that anyone would take his self-defense claim seriously.

In the Rittenhouse case, there are two different issues: Whether Rittenhouse is guilty of a major crime, and what it says about the state of the law if he isn't. Josh Marshall takes on the second question:

the basic argument here is that Rittenhouse wasn’t doing anything wrong by just carrying around an AR-15. Wisconsin’s an open carry state. The inherent aggression and menace of carrying around high caliber weapons, which we’re told is only a problem for squeamish libs, becomes a path for the person carrying the fire arm to themselves feel threatened and decide they need to use the gun.

The aggression carries the seeds of justification within it. You show up looking for trouble on yet another of these right wing murder safaris like Rittenhouse, with his mother chaperoning, was taking part in. You’re looking for trouble and when you find it that’s your justification for taking the next step. That’s not how self-defense is supposed to work. But we can see in this case how the interplay of open carry and permissive self-defense statutes do just that.

Simultaneously, the three White gunmen who killed unarmed Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery are on trial in Georgia. They make an even more unbelievable self-defense claim: Believing (for reasons not entirely clear) that Arbery was responsible for a local burglary, the three men chased him down in their trucks to make a citizen's arrest. When Arbery began to struggle -- as I might were I faced with armed strangers coming after me in trucks -- they felt threatened and killed him. If upheld, this seems to be a model of how to commit murder and get away with it.

https://claytoonz.com/2021/11/09/a-systemic-high-five/

and Glasgow

The Glasgow Climate Conference has ended. The consensus seems to be that the agreements reached are significant but inadequate. The Guardian annotates the text of the joint statement.

and Republicans' growing acceptance of political violence

Friday, the NYT published "Menace Enters the Republican Mainstream", an article which summarizes the growing normalization of right-wing violence and fantasies of violence. It quotes Pomona College political scientist Omar Wasow:

What’s different about almost all those other [violent eras in American history] is that now, there’s a partisan divide around the legitimacy of our political system. The elite endorsement of political violence from factions of the Republican Party is distinct for me from what we saw in the 1960s. Then, you didn’t have — from a president on down — politicians calling citizens to engage in violent resistance.

By comparison very few Republican leaders have spoken out against violence and violent rhetoric in their party.

This week, we found out that former President Trump responded to a question about his supporters chanting "Hang Mike Pence." by criticizing Pence and excusing the people who wanted to hang him.

Well, the people were very angry. ... Because it's common sense, Jon. It's common sense that you're supposed to protect. How can you — if you know a vote is fraudulent, right? — how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress?

Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona posted a video (now unavailable) in which his image was photoshopped into an anime video where he killed a photoshopped AOC and threatened Joe Biden with swords. A small portion was played by Anderson Cooper, who raised the question:

What do you suppose would happen if you went into work one day after you posted a video depicting yourself murdering a coworker and brandishing a sword at the company's CEO? Most of us know the answer: We'd be fired.

Not only is Gosar not being removed from Congress, but Republican House leaders are not even criticizing him. Violent fantasy is just something elected Republicans do these days.

Contrast this incident with when comedian Kathy Griffin -- who held no public office and represents only herself -- posed with a representation of Donald Trump's severed head. She was roundly condemned by Democrats as well as Republicans.

Admittedly, the image of Gosar as an anime warrior is so absurd that it's hard to view the video as a serious threat. But every time people play with ideas like this, they get closer to manifestation. Bullies often "joke" about hurting or raping someone in order to test the waters. If another bully comes back with a more explicit "joke", eventually it becomes a plan.

The Shriekback song "Every Force Evolves a Form" warns that words can "make tracks that your feet just have to follow". Thoughts of violence

float above us like a cloud.
And no one knows where the rain will end up falling.


A code word to watch for is rowdy, which the Right is using to make their violent extremists sound like boys who shoot spitwads at the teacher's back or football fans who get a little too excited after a big win. Tucker Carlson, for example, talked about Trump voters who "got rowdy on January 6".

Last week I mentioned the right-wing framing in a skewed poll by Mark Penn's Harris Group. One of the questions asked: "Do you think the attorney general was right or wrong to say the FBI will treat rowdy parents at school board meetings as potential domestic terrorists?" Unsurprisingly, 64% thought it was wrong -- because if such a thing had ever happened, it would be wrong. But Merrick Garland's actual memo said nothing about rowdiness. Instead he talked about

a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation's public schools. While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views.

Parents who are merely being "rowdy" -- refusing to stay seated, say, or speaking out of turn -- have nothing to fear from the FBI. It's only when they try to achieve their political aims through violence or intimidation -- the definition of terrorism -- that they might run into trouble.

Whenever conservatives describe their allies as "rowdy", they should be challenged to describe the actual behavior they are talking about.

and the pandemic

The post-Halloween upward trend accelerated this week. Daily new cases are above 80K again for the first time since October 18. Hospitalizations (down 8%) and deaths (down 16%) continue a slow decline. It's not clear yet whether that's due to vaccination, improved treatments, or just the time lag since cases turned upward.

The Southeast, which was hit hardest in the late-summer wave, is the only part of the country where conditions are improving.

and you also might be interested in ...

For once, a senator Trump has targeted is going to stand up and make a race of it. Lisa Murkowski will run in 2022, despite facing a Trump-supported primary challenge.


When Republicans accepted Trump's grab-'em-by-the-pussy comment in 2016, and ignored the dozens of women who accused him of abuse, they opened a door that has never closed. Trump is helping candidates for Congress go through that door, despite credible claims of abuse made against them.

The most outrageous example is Max Miller, who is running to replace impeachment-supporting Rep. Anthony Gonzalez in Ohio's 16th district. His accuser is not some random woman Trump might imagine was recruited by Democrats. It's his own former communications director Stephanie Grisham, Miller's former girl friend, who told Jake Tapper "It was like a gut punch when I saw that [Trump] endorsed [Miller], knowing what happened."

Not all people who vote Republican are sexists, but abuse of women is not a deal-breaker for them.


Democrats' and Independents' assessment of crime in their local area changes slowly. But Republican assessments of crime shift suddenly depending on whether their party controls the White House. Republicans' fear of crime in their neighborhoods dropped when Bush replaced Clinton in 2001, shot up again when Obama replaced Bush, plummeted when Trump replaced Obama, and skyrocketed again this year.

Crime, like the deficit, is only a problem when a Democrat is president.


A lot of people have been linking to this 26-second clip of Mike Flynn saying that America needs "one religion". That sounds really bad (and probably is), but it's a short clip and nobody seemed to know any context, other than he said it as part of the Reawaken America Tour that he's on with other right-wing yahoos like Mike Lindell and Alex Jones.

I went looking for a longer clip and couldn't find one until this morning. It seems clear from the longer clip that Flynn envisions all religions coming together voluntarily rather than by force, but his vision should still feel threatening to anyone who isn't a Christian, or isn't a type of Christian Flynn would recognize.

While failing to find that context yesterday, I skimmed over this 11-hour video (now gone) of a day's worth of Reawaken America. Flynn appears for about 20 minutes beginning at the 37-minute mark, but that clip doesn't include the one-religion bit. It's also not in Flynn's segment from the previous day (another 11 hours), which starts around the 9:50 mark. Flynn's schtick seems to be a Q&A format, and we still don't know what he was asked that led to the one-religion answer.

While scanning that longer video to find Flynn, I happened across the presentation by anti-vax Dr. Sherri Tenpenny (an osteopath). (It starts around the 6:20 mark.) From her slides I learned that the vaccine contains nanobots, and that the "mNRA breaks the DNA sulfide bonds and inserts AI; this intentionally removes God -- YHVH -- from your genes."

That's the level of indoctrination people are getting on that tour.


Josh Marshall snarks well. An LA Times tweet promoted an article:

Tasha Adams devoted her life to supporting her husband. She was an exotic dancer to pay for his college, took care of him when he accidentally shot himself in the face, and when he was looking for direction in life, she helped him start the Oath Keepers.

And Marshall replied:

who among us has not accidentally shot ourselves in the face during the directionless period before we started a fascist militia group?


Catherine Nichols' article "The good guy/bad guy myth" is almost four years old, so it's not directly tied to any current news story. But in some sense it's tied to all of them: Our popular culture drenches us with stories in which good guys battle bad guys, with the fate of the world in the balance. But if you take a step back, you realize that traditional folk tales didn't do this.

Stories from an oral tradition never have anything like a modern good guy or bad guy in them, despite their reputation for being moralising. In stories such as Jack and the Beanstalk or Sleeping Beauty, just who is the good guy? Jack is the protagonist we’re meant to root for, yet he has no ethical justification for stealing the giant’s things. Does Sleeping Beauty care about goodness? Does anyone fight crime?

Nor do folktales present a consistent set of values. Some heroes win through honesty, others through trickery. That's true even in the Bible. Jacob, for example, tricks his father Isaac into giving him the blessing intended for his brother Esau. The Norse trickster god Loki is ambiguous -- villainous when he fools Hodr into slaying Baldur, but heroic when his deceptions help Thor reclaim his hammer from a frost giant. He didn't change from one to the other; he was always both.

Nichols argues that the good/bad motif in popular narrative doesn't become dominant until the rise of nation-states, and the corresponding rise of the idea that a nation's folklore represents or defines some kind of national character with positive national values.

Once the idea of national values entered our storytelling, the peculiar moral physics underlying the phenomenon of good guys versus bad guys has been remarkably consistent. One telling feature is that characters frequently change sides in conflicts: if a character’s identity resides in his values, then when he changes his mind about a moral question, he is essentially swapping sides, or defecting.

Comic book villains often flip to become heroes (and are welcomed). Darth Vader turns against the Emperor and is redeemed in death. But no matter how angry Achilles got with Agamemnon, he never considered defecting to Troy; it just wouldn't have made any sense.

I have to wonder how different our politics would be today if we still had narrative options other than good against evil.


Back in 1972, Big Bird encouraged kids to get their measles vaccine without incident, but when BB and several other Sesame Street muppets joined CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta to answer kids' questions in "The ABCs of Covid Vaccination" and Big Bird tweeted about getting vaccinated, it was too much for Senator Ted Cruz and other anti-public-health conservatives.

"Government propaganda ... for your 5-year-old," Cruz tweeted back, as if encouraging children to learn to count and read isn't government propaganda.

The replies to Cruz have been hilarious. Steven Colbert said his response was "brought to you by the letters F and U". A Big Bird parody is running for Senate against Cruz, promising not to "fly away to Cancun when Texas is in trouble". And SNL did a Ted Cruz Street opening, claiming that the senator's show airs on Newsmax Kids right before "White Power Rangers".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAZKwuNvt8c

and let's close with something in this world

Some Icelanders made a tourism video that parodies Mark Zuckerberg's promotion of the metaverse.

Monday, November 8, 2021

Autocrats of Trade

If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

- Senator John Sherman, author of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890

This week's featured post is "How Ominous Were Tuesday's Elections?".

This week everybody was talking about last Tuesday's elections

That's the topic of the featured post.

https://robrogers.com/2021/11/05/dog-whistle/

and the bipartisan infrastructure bill

which finally passed Friday. The bill passed the Senate back in August, but it had been stuck in the House while negotiations on the parallel Build Back Better bill continued. BBB is still stuck, but Tuesday's disappointing election results convinced Democrats that they needed to ring up an accomplishment quickly.

The $1.2 trillion bill really is a BFD for Biden, and it's important that the bill not get overshadowed by what's not in it. Trump talked endlessly about what a great builder he is, but he couldn't get this done and Biden did.

We also shouldn't let the bill fall victim to what Jay Rosen has dubbed the "cult of savviness" in the mainstream media. The important thing is not the play-by-play of the congressional process, it's what the bill does. The short version: fixing run-down roads and bridges, bringing broadband internet to rural areas, upgrading public transit and cross-country rail, improving ports and airports, modernizing the electrical grid, and upgrading water systems by, for example, getting the lead out of water pipes.

and the pandemic

US case numbers had been going down since mid-September, but that trend has flattened at around 72K cases per day, or 22 per 100K people. Deaths continue to fall, but we're still losing about 1200 people a day.

Something I find ominous is the way high-case counties are clustered in the far north, like Coos County, NH (125 cases per 100K), Baraga County, MI (122), Blaine County, MT (135), and the whole state of Alaska (82). Even Vermont, which until now has consistently had low case-counts and high vaccination rates, is up to 49. All are low-population areas where it doesn't take many cases to push the numbers up, but they also all have borders with Canada. Which makes me wonder: Is this a seasonal outbreak that will drift south in the coming weeks?


Pfizer announced a new anti-Covid drug, Paxlovid, that it claims cuts deaths by 89%. Like Merck's recently announced Molnupiravir, Pfizer's drug is a pill that can be taken at home.


The partisan gap in Covid deaths continues to grow.


Starting today, US border checkpoints will let fully vaccinated travelers enter.


https://theweek.com/political-satire/1006731/you-must-comply

I have zero sympathy for police who refuse to get vaccinated or police unions that fight against vaccine mandates. The simple reality is that you aren't allowed to socially distance from the police, if they decide to get in your face. That puts the responsibility on them to minimize the risks they bring to the job.

I completely agree with John Oliver, including the expletives:

This all sums up the American police problem in miniature. The constant refrain we hear from cops every time they kill an unarmed, Black person is, "They should have complied with commands." Because as long as you comply, things will supposedly go well. But that only seems to work one way. Because when officers are asked to follow simple rules or face consequences, a not insignificant amount of them flip their shit.

So if an officer wants to quit over this, fucking let them. Let the individuals who clearly don’t care about public safety stop being in charge of public safety. It is really that simple.


Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University draws a parallel:

There is a viral disease where most infections are mild, asymptomatic. With a very low fatality rate. And large age gradient: kids are even lower risk than adults. And less than 1% of kids have any serious complications at all.

Yup. Polio. And we vaccinate against it

but I want to talk about a book

Senator Amy Klobuchar has written a much meatier book than you typically get from a politician: Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power From the Gilded Age to the Digital Age. (That's where I got the Sherman quote at the top of the page.) It is as engagingly written as a book with this many footnotes can be, and does two things: tells the story of American antitrust law, and advocates for updating the laws to handle the particular problems of monopoly and monopsony in the current era.

Klobuchar turns out to have an antitrust background. Early in her career as a lawyer, she represented MCI as it tried to break into the telephone market then dominated by AT&T. Today, she is on the Senate Commerce Committee.

In addition to her specific proposals -- the book has many of them -- Klobuchar wants to take the anti-monopoly movement back from the lawyers (even though she is one). Antitrust has become a complex legal specialty that in many ways is far removed from the popular movement that spawned it in the 19th century. Leaving it to the lawyers might be fine if the laws on the books solved the problem and only needed enforcement. But monopolistic practices keep evolving while the law stands still -- or even backtracks, as our big-business-friendly Supreme Court interprets antitrust laws in ways that make them ever harder to apply.

That situation will only change if there is political pressure. And since the big money is lined up against such change, the only place it can come from is people.

and you also might be interested in ...

I am a former fan of Green Bay Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who has broken NFL Covid protocols and deceived the public about his vaccination status. When asked by reporters weeks ago, Rodgers said he had been "immunized", which to him meant something different from vaccinated.

The public found out about the deception this week when he tested positive for Covid. The NFL requires unvaccinated players to isolate from their teams for ten days after a positive test, and they finally decided to enforce the rules on the league MVP, causing him to miss Sunday's loss to Kansas City.

AP summarizes the NFL protocols and who is responsible for enforcing them. The Atlantic's Jamele Hill provides commentary.

But the stunning news of Rodgers’s COVID-19 diagnosis has been compounded by what else it revealed: Rodgers had lied about his vaccination status, and his team had likely provided cover for his deception. Both the Packers and the league itself have stood idly by as the reigning NFL MVP apparently violated safety protocols and jeopardized the health of others around him.

Throughout the season, Rodgers has been seen maskless many times at indoor press conferences. Per the NFL’s coronavirus protocols, unvaccinated players are required to wear masks at all times inside club facilities, submit to daily PCR testing, and avoid being within six feet of other unvaccinated players while traveling or eating meals. ... Rodgers has put the NFL’s credibility in jeopardy. The situation raises the obvious question of whether other teams have been covering for unvaccinated key players.

It got worse from there. Rather than apologize, Rodgers lashed out at the "woke mob" and "cancel culture" in an interview where he

rattled off a Bingo card’s worth of anti-vaxx catchphrases: Ivermectin, “politicized,” “my own research,” a Martin Luther King Jr. quote applied wildly out of context (“You have a moral obligation to object to unjust rules”), “monoclonals,” “sterility,” and more.

“I’m not some sort of anti-vaxx flat-earther. I am somebody who’s a critical thinker. I march to the beat of my own drum. I believe strongly in bodily autonomy, and the ability to make choices for your body, not to have to acquiesce to some woke culture or crazed group of individuals who say you have to do something.”

That "crazed group of individuals" includes his employer, who has paid him $263 million during his 17-year career.

His main sponsor, State Farm Insurance, is standing by him publicly, but has reduced his appearances from 25% of their commercials to under 2%.


I'm glad to hear the Justice Department link the Texas abortion law to what a blue state could do against gun rights.

A state might, for example, ban the sale of firearms for home protection, contra District of Columbia v. Heller, or prohibit independent corporate campaign advertising, contra Citizens United v. FEC, and deputize its citizens to seek large bounties for each sale or advertisement. Those statutes, too, would plainly violate the Constitution as interpreted by this court. But under Texas’ theory, they could be enforced without prior judicial review — and, by creating an enforcement scheme sufficiently lopsided and punitive, the state could deter the exercise of the target right altogether.


To the disappointment of Q-Anon faithful who gathered on Dallas' famous grassy knoll Tuesday, JFK Jr. did not return from his apparent death (faked 20 years ago, according to the theory) to become the VP of a restored Trump administration. So it's on to the next crazy prediction.

and let's close with a love story

Hubert and Kalissa were a bonded pair of lions described as "inseparable" by the Los Angeles Zoo curator of animals. Both 21 years old, they had far outlived a typical lion lifespan of 14-17 years. Suffering from a variety of age-related infirmities that had "diminished their quality of life", the two were euthanized together so that neither would have to be alone.

The couple met at Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo, and in 2014 were transferred to Los Angeles where "They quickly became favorites among LA Zoo guests and staff and were known for their frequent cuddles and nuzzles."

Monday, November 1, 2021

Wormtongues

In the days and hours leading up to the counting of the electoral votes in Congress, a cadre of outside lawyers to the President spun a web of lies and disinformation, to him and to the public, for the purpose of pressuring the Vice President to betray his oath to uphold our laws and the Constitution of the United States. ... There is no room in the legal profession for Grima Wormtongues who counsel their clients with half-truths and deceptive presentations made in pursuit of a personal agenda.

- Greg Jacob
Chief Counsel to Vice President Mike Pence
January, 2021

This week's featured post is "Freedom Isn't What It Used To Be".

This week everybody was talking about the state of the Democrats' negotiations

https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-1023-cartoon-1-20211022-jjeheytrxbayvpv6z5jk7tc2lm-story.html

Thursday, President Biden announced a slimmed-down version of his Build Back Better plan: $1.75 trillion versus the previous $3.5 trillion. Senators Manchin and Sinema have not endorsed the plan, but they also haven't rejected it. Josh Marshall observes that "The number of outstanding issues has dropped precipitously."

So maybe we're almost there. Vox has a summary of what Biden's framework (it's still not a bill) contains, but I'm trying not to get too excited one way or another until we know that it's really going to happen.

and the Virginia governor's race

Tomorrow is election day in Virginia. It comes at a bad time for the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe. The Democrats' struggle to pass some version of Biden's agenda makes them look ineffective right now, even if it might result in significant action soon. The latest Covid surge is fading, but the back-to-normal promise of last spring is still unfulfilled. Inflation and supply-chain issues are global, but Biden is being blamed for them.

In addition, Republicans are trying out their 2022 strategy. Biden beat Trump by more than seven million votes in 2020 for two main reasons:

  • Huge Black turnout.
  • Previously Republican suburban voters, especially educated women, turned against Trump.

Maybe in some parallel universe Republicans are responding to that resounding rejection by toning down the racism and sexism of the Trump years. But in our world, they're passing laws to make voting harder for Black people, while hyping a phony issue (critical race theory in the public schools) to scare White parents away from Democrats.

Voter suppression is hard to do in Virginia, which currently has a Democratic governor and legislature. But the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Glenn Youngkin, is all-in for the phony issue. Paul Waldman puts it like this:

Imagine it’s January 2023, and Gov. Youngkin gathers his staff for a meeting to celebrate the end of his first year in office. “I want to congratulate all of you,” he says. “We’ve done just what we said we would: For the last year, all of you have worked tirelessly, day in and day out, to make sure no critical race theory is taught in any school in the state.”

That scene is preposterous to the point of parody. The idea that what Youngkin would do as governor has even a remote relationship to what he is running on is absurd.

Recent polls are close, but show Youngkin with a very small lead and momentum. If he wins, Republicans will feel their 2022 strategy is good to go nationally.

and the climate summit

World leaders are currently meeting in Glasgow to attempt to hammer out a successor to the Paris Agreement of 2015, which Trump withdrew the United States from.

President Biden would like to be a leader in forging a significant agreement, but his position has been undercut by the changes Senator Manchin of coal-mining West Virginia has forced on his Build Back Better plan.

If Mr. Biden lacks a reliable plan for the United States to significantly cut its emissions this decade, it would “send a signal” to other major emitters that America is still not serious, [Lia Nicholson, a senior adviser to the Alliance of Small Island States] said. And it would be difficult for Mr. Biden to urge other countries to take more meaningful steps away from fossil fuels, others said.


Biden went to Glasgow from the G-20 meeting in Rome, which endorsed a 15% minimum corporate tax. Up to now, corporations have been able to play countries off against one another, creating a race to the bottom on corporate tax rates. If the G-20 nations follow through, that race would stop.

and the pandemic

Tuesday, an advisory committee for the FDA recommended approving Covid vaccinations for children ages 5-11. Vaccines are already approved for everyone 12 and up. The vaccines for younger children are still not available and there's considerable disagreement about how many families will want them.


Case numbers are not falling as fast as in recent weeks. The US is averaging about 73K new cases per day, which is about the same as last week. Deaths are down to an average of 1346 a day, down from over 1400 last week. The NYT is reporting that unvaccinated people are dying at about 12 times the rate of fully vaccinated people.


The Supreme Court refused to block Maine's vaccine mandate. The case was brought by healthcare workers who were up against the Friday deadline.

This is a shadow docket case asking for emergency relief, so no majority opinion was published. Justice Gorsuch did write a dissent, which Justices Alito and Thomas signed on to. Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh published a one-paragraph concurrence on largely technical grounds: The shadow docket shouldn't be used to force the court to rule on a case that otherwise was unlikely to reach them.

Briefly, the reason for Gorsuch's dissent is that healthcare workers can get an exemption for medical reasons, but not for religious reasons. His argument builds on previous ridiculous opinions from 2020-21 that elevate the most tenuous religious claims to the highest level -- if they're based on popular Christian (especially Catholic) beliefs. Gorsuch also quotes the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop case, which similarly granted conservative Christian beliefs about marriage a level of consideration no non-Christian belief will ever get from this Court.

The plaintiffs' religious objection in this case is

that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine required the use of abortion-related materials in its production, and that Moderna and Pfizer relied on aborted fetal cell lines to develop their vaccines.

Note how far we have gotten, both in time and in the causal chain, from any actual abortion. I'm not sure what the J&J issue is, but for Pfizer and Moderna we're talking about a cell line developed from an abortion in 1973, with no suggestion that the research value of the cells played any role in the abortion decision. This is the kind of thing I was talking about in 2013 when I described conservative "religious freedom" as passive aggression. People are arbitrarily extending their moral concerns for the purpose of tripping up other people.

If a policy Gorsuch liked were at stake, would he give similar weight to a Hindu whose scruple is based on a sacred cow killed in 1973, none of whose original cells are present? What if someone's religious objection had a similarly long causal chain related to climate change? (The implementation of just about any policy involves fossil fuels at some point.)

Those cases would be laughed out of court. But three justices want to approve this one, because Gorsuch et al grant special rights to people who share their religious beliefs.


Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto tested positive for Covid, which is a big deal for a guy whose lungs were involved in a previous bout with cancer. He believes that being vaccinated has saved his life, and said so on the air, while urging his viewers to get vaccinated. "Then came the death threats," NPR reports.


https://www.gocomics.com/stevebenson/2021/10/25

I'm not going to repost the graph (because it has tiny print and displays really badly), but you should look at Duke sociology Professor Kieran Healy's "The Polarization of Death". He groups US counties into deciles, based on Trump's percentage of the 2020 vote, and then plots the cumulative Covid death rates per 100K people through time. This results in "an ecological picture of the relationship between deaths and political polarization".

The bluest decile starts out with the most deaths. (Recall how the first wave hammered New York City, the Northeast, and big cities in general.) But last year's Thanksgiving-to-New-Years holiday surge primarily targeted the reddest counties, and by now the deciles are in almost-perfect order, from the 90-100% Trump counties averaging over 300 deaths per 100K to the 10-20% counties a hair above 200. (The 0-10% counties are slightly higher than the 10-20% counties. That's the only out-of-sequence result.)

You can imagine a lot of explanations for this, including that Trump counties tend to have more old people than Biden counties. But the Trumpist resistance to public health measures of all sorts has to play an important role.

and Halloween

which was yesterday. For some reason, what caught my attention this year was the funny stuff rather than the creepy or scary stuff.

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1186134-pumpkin-carving-art

You don't see a lot of telescope jokes.

https://imgur.com/gallery/Z3N5DUd

And candy corn had enough PR problems before someone noticed its resemblance to a former president.

I loved this tweet from (currently suspended) @leahtriss:

I'm going as a Former Gifted Kid for Hallowe'en. The whole costume is just going to be people asking "What are you supposed to be?" and me saying, "I was supposed to be a lot of things."

And finally: Ruth Vader Ginsburg wielding her light gavel.

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/9sjzrc/ruth_vader_ginsburg/

and the Trump coup

This week we found out about an article Mike Pence's chief counsel Greg Jacobs drafted but decided not to publish after January 6. The most striking quote is at the top of this page.

Emails exchanged during the riot between Jacobs and John Eastman, the architect of the Pence-can-undo-the-election theory, also came out. Jacobs blamed the siege of the Capitol on Eastman's "bullshit legal advice". Eastman replied that

The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened


Rolling Stone has a long article about Trump officials and Republican members of Congress who helped plan the January 6 demonstrations. To me, the key point is whether the people at those planning sessions knew or should have known that the event would turn violent. If January 6 had just been a Trump rally, followed by a march to surround the Capitol and yell a lot, that would have been a legitimate use of the right to assemble. If I were somebody involved in January 6 planning, I'd claim the violence was a complete surprise to me.

and more book restrictions in Texas

Following up on "Reading While Texan" from two weeks ago: The Texas Tribune reports that a Republican state representative (who is running for attorney general) is opening an official legislative "inquiry into Texas school district content". So far that mainly means that he has sent a list of 850 books to the districts, asking them how many copies they have of each, where they shelve them, and how much they spent acquiring them.

The accompanying letter asks for information on additional

books or content ... that address or contain the following topics: human sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), sexually explicit images, graphic presentations of sexual behavior that is in violation of the law, or contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

By focusing on how content "might make students feel", the inquiry liberates itself from any objective criteria. (Ever notice how fuck-your-feelings conservatives turn into bleeding hearts as soon as White people are upset?) It also risks misidentifying the root cause of those feelings. Being well informed is not always comfortable. ("The more knowledge, the more grief," says Ecclesiastes.) So if reading Me and White Supremacy causes "discomfort", maybe the problem is white supremacy, not the book.

The legislator's list includes highly regarded titles like The New Jim Crow, Caste, Between the World and Me, and just about any other book you can think of that suggests America might have a race problem. (New Kid, which I talked about two weeks ago, is on the list.) It includes novels, graphic novels, memoirs, history books, and books about the physical changes teens might be noticing in their bodies. Oddly, the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is on the list, but the original is not. And I'm not totally sure why V For Vendetta is listed.

It's not a censorship list (yet), but the fact that these books are the subject of an "inquiry" is bound to have the kind of chilling effect on teachers and librarians that I talked about two weeks ago.

https://nickanderson.substack.com/p/the-book-burning

A counterpoint is Maia Kobabe's op-ed in the Washington Post about the banning (in multiple school districts) of her graphic (in the words-plus-drawings sense) book Gender Queer: a memoir.

Queer youth are often forced to look outside their own homes, and outside the education system, to find information on who they are. Removing or restricting queer books in libraries and schools is like cutting a lifeline for queer youth, who might not yet even know what terms to ask Google to find out more about their own identities, bodies and health.

and you also might be interested in ...

Paul Krugman on the current inflation/supply-chain problems:

The most important point, however, may be not to overreact to current events. The fact that shortages and inflation are happening around the world is actually an indication that national policies aren’t the main cause of the problems. They are, instead, largely inevitable as economies try to restart after the epic disruptions caused by Covid-19. It will take time to sort things out — more time than most people, myself included, expected. But a frantic attempt to restore the status quo on inflation would do more harm than good.


The migrant families who had their children stolen away by the Trump administration may get compensation from the Biden administration.


A case that initially seemed to validate the conservative dark fantasy about trans people and bathrooms turns out not to be as it first appeared.


Contrary to opinions I've been linking to in recent weeks, a University of Virginia professor claims Trump can claim executive privilege.


Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen-ager who killed two people during anti-police demonstrations in Racine, and who has become a hero on the Right, seems to have lucked into a biased judge. The defense can refer to the people he killed as "looters" and "rioters", but the prosecution is not allowed to call them "victims".

When liberals complain about the growing violence of the Right, the usual response is to point to the sporadic clashes between liberal demonstrators and police during the George Floyd protests. The Rittenhouse-is-a-hero phenomenon, though, has no parallel on the Left. Ditto for Ashley-Babbitt-is-a-martyr.


You'll never guess who's been getting the biggest paychecks in the NFL: the commissioner, Roger Goodell. He was paid $128 million over the last two years. The highest-paid player, Patrick Mahommes, makes a measly $45 million a year.

That comparison of executive and athlete salaries reminds me of what Babe Ruth is supposed to have said during the Depression, when somebody pointed out that his $80,000 salary was more than President Hoover was making: "I had a better year than he did."


Slate posted an article "Historians Are Fighting" about the within-the-profession battles touched off by The 1619 Project, which posits the preservation of slavery as a major motivation for the American Revolution. It seems to me that there's room for a middle ground about the Founders: We can celebrate their revolution as a generally positive step in the global march towards democracy and human rights, while correcting past scholarship that air-brushed their failings and made them into gods. Liberty-for-White-Christian-males was a glass-partly-full in a world of mostly empty glasses.


Vulture's Roxana Hadadi looks at what she calls the "desert problem" of Dune, both in the new movie and in Frank Herbert's original book. One thing that has changed since the novel's debut in 1968 is the attention we pay to cultural appropriation, or what Edward Said labeled "orientalism" in his 1978 book.


Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) is being investigated by the SEC for insider trading. Burr sold $1.6 million in stocks in January and February of 2020, shortly before the market reacted to the Covid pandemic by dropping sharply. Burr's brother-in-law also unloaded stock around the same time, shortly after a phone conversation with Burr.

Burr was cleared by the Trump Justice Department (which more and more looks like it bore the same resemblance to justice that Trump University did to universities) on Trump's last day in office, but the SEC has continued to investigate.


Rand Paul reported -- 16 months past the legal deadline -- that his wife bought stock in Gilead Sciences, the maker of anti-Covid drug remdesivir, on February 26, 2020. That would be after a committee Paul sits on had been briefed about the approaching global pandemic, but before the danger was appreciated by the general public.

There are a couple of reasons why this isn't the torches-and-pitchforks scandal that Burr's might be: Gilead stock in fact didn't take off. (The article says Paul's wife is slightly underwater on the investment.) And the investment was less than $15K.

Still, I think Chris Hayes has the right take on this:

Let's imagine how @RandPaul would react to this news if it were about Fauci.

To me, all the questions about whether congresspeople were trading on inside information raises a more basic question: Why are they allowed to trade stocks at all? They're paid a nice salary, have a good pension plan, and usually have good job prospects if they leave or lose their seats without disgracing themselves. Would it be such a hardship to lock their investments in an index fund while they're in office?


University of Florida has ordered three of its professors not to testify as expert witnesses against the state's voter suppression law. The university characterized the expert-witness gig as "outside paid work that is adverse to the university's interests as a state of Florida institution".

Actually, though, the lawsuit the wants the professors' testimony is just adverse to the De Santis administration and the Republican Party, not the state of Florida. If UF has been threatened with repercussions if its professors testify, that's a significant violation of American political traditions, and probably the law. Josh Marshall comments:

One of the features of American democracy is a fairly sharp line between political activity, the electoral activity of parties and the functions of the state. A state governor has budgets and powers to run the state. But he or she can’t use them to run for reelection. Ignoring these distinctions was one of the most defining features of Trump’s presidency. I am the state, as it were. We can see now that that approach increasingly suffuses the whole GOP.

and let's close with something brilliant

Financial Times identifies twenty of the most "brilliant" bookstores in the world. Several are in the US, but none of the American shops look quite as awesome as the Dujiangyan Zhongshuge Bookstore in Sichuan, China, which was profiled in more detail in Architectural Digest. I'm not sure how you get to all those shelves, though.

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/surreal-new-bookstore-opened-china