No Sift next week. The next new articles will post on November 20.
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. I do not think this is necessary.
- Bertrand Russell
"Present Perplexities" (1953)
This week's featured post is "Can we talk about Israel and Palestine?"
This week everybody was avoiding talking about the war in Gaza
That reluctance is the subject of the featured post.
This week Israeli troops moved into Gaza in force, and have encircled Gaza City, cutting the region in two. The Gaza health ministry now reports over 10,000 Palestinian deaths, though this number can't be independently verified.
Here are a couple of links that didn't make it into the featured post: Ta-Nahisi Coates goes to the West Bank and interprets what he sees through the lens of Jim Crow: Some people can vote and others can't. Some people can go wherever they want and others can't. The history of how things got to be this way may be complicated, Coates says, but the morality of it is simple.
And Nicholas Kristof visits two Palestinian men he met 41 years ago on a bus.
I pushed back and noted how brutal the Hamas terrorism had been and how many Israeli civilians had been killed or kidnapped. Saleh and Mahmoud said that they mourned the Israeli deaths, but wondered why the world wasn’t equally outraged that Palestinians have been killed in cumulatively greater numbers. They were disappointed by my focus on the Hamas barbarism, and I was disappointed by their reluctance to unequivocally condemn those attacks.
... We parted, all of us less spry than we had been the first time. They were fairly ordinary Palestinian men who had mostly kept their heads down; they had avoided politics and had not lost family members to the conflict. But they had lost freedom and dignity. There are untold numbers just like them who never make the headlines but are stewing inside.
I remembered two young men full of promise and warmth, animated by hope and inhabiting a world in which Israelis and Palestinians interacted regularly and didn’t much fear each other. It is wrenching to see such change. As Saleh and Mahmoud became dads and grandfathers, they were shorn of a future, of vitality, of hope.
And that, I think, is the core of the Palestinian problem.
and talking about the new Speaker's first bill
OK, the House has a speaker again so it's open for business and ready to govern. Sort of.
The first order of business is a $105 billion emergency spending bill Biden proposed that included money for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and the southern border. It seems likely to pass the Senate with a substantial bipartisan majority.
But "No, no, no," the House Republican majority says. "That's not how we want to do business any more. We'll unbundle the pieces and look at them separately, then combine them with cuts so that spending doesn't increase."
One problem with that approach is that bundling proposals together is how you assemble coalitions big enough to pass things. But never mind, Israel is popular, so let's start there: a $14.3 billion aid-to-Israel bill that is offset by a $14.3 billion cut in funding the IRS, undoing a piece of Biden's Inflation Reduction Act that passed last year before Republicans got control of the House.
But there's a snag in the House's logic: The IRS funding was supposed to crack down on rich tax cheats, and is expected to raise more revenue than it costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting $14.3 billion out of the IRS budget will decrease revenue by $26.8 billion over ten years, for a net deficit increase of $12.5 billion. (The Fox News story on the bill leaves this detail out.)
So in order to "balance" deficit-increasing aid for Israel, the House adds a deficit-increasing cut to the IRS.
A few things we can conclude from this:
- House Republicans aren't serious about the deficit. If they were, they'd pair the $14 billion of Israel aid with $14 billion of deficit reduction, not an additional deficit increase.
- They aren't serious about helping Israel. Otherwise they wouldn't try to score political points that will slow down coming to an agreement with the Senate.
- Getting aid to Ukraine is going to be difficult. (That should make Putin happy.)
- Helping rich people cheat on their taxes is a high priority for them.
- If this is how Speaker Johnson approaches legislation, avoiding a government shutdown is going to be difficult. New funding has to pass both houses of Congress by a week from Friday.
Cutting spending: Great idea! Here's a Labor Party video from Britain a few years ago that explains how austerity (doesn't) work.
and prejudice rising in America
There were always a number of things wrong with the "melting pot" imagery America once used to describe itself. (Chiefly: the assumption that you had to give up your prior ethnic identity to become truly American, and the fact that we never allowed Black people to fully melt in.) But there's one thing it got right: Whatever ethnic squabbles you had in the old country should be left in the old country. Germany/France, Greece/Turkey, Serb/Croat -- whatever it was, we didn't want it here. Of course we developed our own ethnic rivalries, but at least they were based on things that happened in America, not feuds brought across the ocean. Mr. Dubois and Mr. Schwartz could be good neighbors here, whatever the Der Kaiser and la République were bickering about.
We seem to have lost that. One of the many depressing aspects of the current conflict in Israel and Gaza is antisemitic and Islamophobic violence in the United States. This much should be obvious: Your Palestinian-American neighbor is not a Hamas terrorist and your Jewish-American neighbor is not trying to steal anybody's ancestral land. I understand that Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East face difficult issues that I don't know how to resolve. But the echoing violence here in America is something we can and should just stop. There's no reason for it.
and the Trump trials
Donald Trump is testifying today in the New York civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization. Last week, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric testified, and Ivanka is due up on Wednesday.
Last Friday on MSNBC's "Deadline White House", former DoJ official Andrew Weissman outlined the standard Trump family strategy on testifying. (Sorry I can't find video on this or quote him exactly.)
The first ploy, Weissman said, is to claim to be the smartest person in the room. You see this, for example, in things Trump has said about valuing Mar-a-Lago: He knows what it is worth, and nobody else's opinion matters. Appraisers don't know, assessors don't know, accountants don't know -- but he knows. When that fails, the back-up ploy is to claim to be the dumbest person in the room: It's not my job to know these things; I have people for that. I just do what the accountants and lawyers tell me.
It will be interesting to see which way Trump himself goes today.
Don Jr. and Eric were using the second ploy in their testimony. Junior's Wharton MBA, he testified, doesn't mean that he knows anything about accounting. (I have it on good authority that other Wharton MBAs were mortified by this.) The accountants, the Trump sons both claimed, did the financial statements and they just signed off on them.
Both of them were tripped up by Assistant Attorneys General Colleen Faherty and Andrew Amer, who produced emails and other documents the sons couldn't explain.
If you've ever had somebody else do your taxes, you should understand that accountants don't work the way the Trumps claimed. Accountants are not auditors; they apply laws and rules to the numbers you give them. If you lie to your accountant about, say, what you spent to keep your home business operating or how much you paid for the house you just sold, it's not up to the accountant to do an independent investigation and correct you.
Same thing here: When Trump claimed his Trump Tower apartment was three times its actual size, it wasn't the accountants' responsibility to get out a tape measure and check.
and tomorrow's elections
Ohio votes on whether to guarantee a right to abortion. Kentucky and Mississippi have surprisingly competitive governor's races. And Virginia's legislative elections will tell us whether the issues Glenn Youngkin won on two years ago still resonate.
this week's best schadenfreude moments
Now that Mark Meadows appears to be offering testimony that contradicts what he said in his book, his publisher is suing him.
Crypto-currency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on all counts. Wikipedia sums up his spectacular fall:
Prior to FTX's collapse, Bankman-Fried was ranked the 41st richest American in the Forbes 400, and the 60th richest person in world by The World's Billionaires. His net worth peaked at $26 billion. By November 11, 2022, amid the bankruptcy of FTX, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index considered his net worth to have been reduced to zero.
The satirical NYT Pitchbot's take:
If the federal prosecutors can put Sam Bankman-Fried in jail for stealing billions of dollars, imagine what they can do to you.
but hardly anybody has been talking about the World Series
If you're younger than, say, 50, you probably have no notion of what the World Series meant when I was growing up in the 1960s. For a little over a week, the world all but stopped. If somebody was playing football on Saturday or Sunday, nobody noticed.
And it wasn't just the sports world that ground to a halt: The games were all played in the daytime until 1971, and radio broadcasts echoed through factories and other workplaces. Young fans like me applied considerable ingenuity to sneaking radios into our classrooms. (If you could stuff one of the cheap new transistor radios into a shirt pocket and cover the bulge with a sweater, you could thread the earphone cord under a sleeve as far as your left wrist -- or right wrist if you were left-handed. Then you could prop your head up palm-to-ear while pretending to do schoolwork with your dominant hand.)
There were no "playoffs" until 1969, and no "wild card" teams until 1995. The regular-season champion of the National and American Leagues played each other, and since there was no interleague play during the season (until 1997), the two leagues were impossible to compare. So the Series held a considerable mystique: These match-ups -- Mickey Mantle facing Sandy Koufax or Bob Gibson -- could only happen in an All-Star game or a World Series. No one knew what to expect.
That mystique cloaked a difficult truth about baseball: Unlike football or basketball, baseball is so inherently random and streaky that you can't tell how good a team is by watching it for only a week or two. (For example, countless no-name pitchers have thrown no-hitters during their one magical day in the sun, only to immediately fade back into obscurity.) So while it was undoubtedly true that occasionally the lesser team won the World Series (like the Pirates beating the Yankees in 1960 despite being outscored 55-27 over the course of seven games), it was easy to suspend disbelief and convince yourself that the winner was indeed the best team.
That's much harder to do now. Twelve teams -- nearly half of the 30-team league -- get into the playoffs, so one or two of them are bound to get hot and play way over their heads for a few weeks. Whichever two teams are most favored by luck and circumstance will meet in the World Series, and one of them will win. Is that "champion" the best team in baseball? Don't be silly.
Under the pre-1969 system, this year's World Series would have featured the Orioles (101-61 in the regular season) against the Braves (104-58), instead of the Rangers (90-72) against the Diamondbacks (84-78). An Orioles/Braves series would have been the culmination of the drama fans had been watching all summer. (Within the National League, the Braves/Dodgers pennant race would have been epic.) Instead, those of us living outside of Texas and Arizona were scratching our heads saying, "Wait. Who are these guys again?"
Or we just ignored it. Because "World Series winner" -- the Rangers this year, in case you hadn't heard -- has just become a line in a record book. It doesn't actually mean anything any more.
and you also might be interested in ...
The latest set of polls from NYT/Siena aren't good, and aren't good in mysterious ways: Trump has a surprising amount of support among young voters and voters of color.
I finally broke down and subscribed the The Status Kuo blog by Jay Kuo. His latest post is "One Year Out from Election 2024", and it roughly parallels the argument I made in "About the Polls" in September. He is concerned about the polls, but still thinks Biden is in a far better position than the polls make it appear.
Every single Dem presidential candidate of my lifetime, the tag-team of RW media & shitty MSM has honed in on some (often silly) weakness & beaten it to death. Gore is insincere; Kerry's a flip-flopper; Clinton had her emails; Biden's age. Only Obama has escaped this. ...
Any realistic alternative to Biden would also be tagged with some flaw, some Thing, some narrative that the media beat to death until the public started repeating it back to them. It's structural, just how the game works.
And then we'd get calls to shove that person aside in favor of some other even-more-unicorn unicorn that would not be subject to the same shit. There is no unicorn. Solve the structural information problem or things keep getting worse.
It reminds me of a refrain I've heard so often in climate/energy over the years: "they've polarized X, let's talk about Y instead." Dudes. They can polarize anything! They've spent decades building a giant polarization machine! There is no non-polarizeable term/tech/policy!
The vote to expel George Santos from Congress failed. But the interesting voice here is Jeff Jackson, a Democrat who voted not to expel him. Jackson points out that an Ethics Committee report on Santos is due in two weeks. The Ethics Committee process that gives investigated members certain rights, and expelling Santos without the report would set a bad precedent. Jackson fully expects to vote to expel Santos after the report comes out, but not until then.
“But Jeff, the other side doesn’t care about precedent or due process!” Perhaps, but I do. And I think we all should. So that’s the standard I’ll defend.
MSNBC's Hayes Brown argues the other side:
The bigger threat, as I see it, is not that members are kicked out too easily for partisan reasons. It’s that members who are clearly unfit to serve are permitted to remain because of the letters next to their names.
and let's close with something anachronistic
I've closed with this 2Cellos video before, but not for nine years. This 17th-century performance of AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" is worth a second look.
Just for reference, here's AC/DC's original.
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