Monday, October 7, 2024

Tactics and Strategy

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on October 21.

It’s a tactical success, but what is the strategy?

- Randa Slim on Israel's war against Hamas and Hezbollah,
quoted by Nicholas Kristof

This week's featured post is "One year later".

This week everybody should have been talking about good economic news

The pandemic laid a one-two punch on the world economy. First came the job losses, and then an inflation spike associated with reopening the economy. Those same two phenomena happened all over the world, which is why (as I often point out) it's a mistake to blame either Trump for the job losses or Biden for the inflation.

Sadly, though, most Americans understand only half of that truth: They give Trump a mulligan for his job losses while blaming Biden for inflation. In the public mind, the "Trump economy" is the pre-Covid 2019 economy, while Biden is held responsible for everything that has happened since.

What is remarkable, though, is how fast the US economy has bounced back, and the Biden administration deserves a lot of credit for that. In 2023, inflation-adjusted household income very nearly regained its 2019 high, and may well be at record levels by now. I have had trouble finding apples-to-apples statistics from other countries, but I believe no comparable nation has done as well with the Covid one-two punch as the US has.

This week we got more evidence for this view: The September jobs report came out showing a very strong economy: 254K new jobs were added (about 100K beyond economists' expectations) and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1%.

Other good news: The East Coast dockworkers strike was suspended, preventing a major disruption of the economy just weeks before the election. (The work stoppage we did see is comparable to a spate of bad weather.) The shipping companies made a new offer, which was close enough to what unions are looking for to continue negotiations through January 15.

and the anniversary of October 7

This is covered in the featured post.

By coincidence, this week was also marked by the publication of a new book, The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is the foremost Black public intellectual, and possibly the most significant American public intellectual. The final chapter of the book discusses his trip to the West Bank. (I haven't read the whole book, but I have read that chapter.)

The controversy this chapter has raised underlines a point I made in the featured post: how hard it is to have a reasonable discussion of Israel/Palestine. A broad theme of The Message is how writers shape the world by deciding whose stories get told. People whose stories aren't told don't get fully envisioned as human beings.

Coates sees the Palestinians as such people, and tries to counteract their less-than status by telling some of their stories. He notes that no news organization he is aware of has a Palestinian bureau chief in Jerusalem. When Palestine is discussed in American media, Palestinian voices are usually not included. (I'm guilty of this myself. Even when I criticize Israel's treatment of Palestinians, I am usually linking to liberal American Jews like Peter Beinart.)

In some circles Coates has been met with vitriol, and broad implications that he is antisemitic. One CBS interviewer in particular went after him for not including more Israeli points of view. (He does talk to ex-IDF Israelis sympathetic to the Palestinian situation.) Coates kept his cool and explained that Israeli points of view are already widely available in American media.

Coates has also faced criticism for not being a Middle Eastern expert and missing the complexity of the situation. If I might put words in Coates' mouth, he seems to be saying that solutions may be complicated, but certain basic moral judgments are simple.

The book makes many analogies between the Palestinian apartheid and slavery/Jim Crow in the US, so I'll make another one: Before the Civil War, many Northerners toured the South and came back to denounce slavery. Universally, Southerners responded the way many have responded to Coates: They said the Northerners didn't understand the complexities of the situation. How would a post-slavery Southern economy work? How would the races coexist? It was complicated.

But you didn't need answers to those questions to look at the immediate reality of slavery and say "This is wrong." That's what Coates does. He wanders through neighborhoods of the West Bank, sees how people are treated, and says "This is wrong."

and Jack Smith's evidence

The Supreme Court has done a lot to help Trump get away with his January 6 coup. They sat on their hands to delay their decision as long as possible, and then invented a notion of "presidential immunity" that no lower court had any notion of. It's not in the Constitution and there's no indication that any pre-Trump administration believed it had such immunity.

As a result, Trump's trial has been pushed past the election, and may not happen at all. This means that voters will have to decide the 2024 election without knowing precisely how Trump tried to invalidate the 2020 election. January 6 has become a he-said/she-said event, rather than the subject of a jury verdict.

But part of the delay is that the district court has to determine what charges and what evidence can survive the Supreme Court's ruling. So Jack Smith assembled a 165-page brief describing the evidence he wants to present at trial and why he thinks it should not be subject to presidential immunity. This is as much of the evidence against Trump as the public is going to see before the election.

Just Security has posted an annotated version of Smith's brief that re-enters nearly all the redacted names. In general, we got new details of the evidence, but the basic story remains the same.

As usual, Trump has had nothing specific to say about the evidence presented in the filing, but only assailed it in general as "election interference" and a "witch hunt". In response, two facts are worth pointing out:

  • Very little of the evidence the special counsel has collected comes from Democrats or never-Trump Republicans. Nearly all of it references grand jury testimony under oath by Republicans who supported the Trump campaign through Election Day. (A few, like Bill Barr, only broke with him after he started lying about his electoral defeat.)
  • The brief is appearing now, just before the election, because Trump has pursued every opportunity for delay, and the Republicans on the Supreme Court have aided and abetted him at every turn. Otherwise, this trial would have been over by now. If he really were innocent -- which he isn't -- Trump could have cleared his name long before the election.

and the VP debate

Last week I said that VP debates seldom move the needle in an election, and I think that held true for the Walz/Vance debate. [video, transcript]

Debates always have two impacts: in the moment and over time. People who watched the debate live tended to see Vance as the smoother debater who had fewer awkward moments. But the lasting impressions favor Walz: He confronted Vance directly on the question of who won the 2020 election, which Vance could not bring himself to answer. And Vance's objection to being fact-checked crystallized his ticket's approach, which is to get away with saying whatever they can, without regard to truth. Going forward, both clips provide fodder for Harris/Walz attack ads.

Vance's nonanswer underlines something more general and ominous: The GOP has become an autocratic party where no one dares to offend the autocrat. We saw the same thing this weekend with Speaker Mike Johnson.

On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos asked Johnson whether he can “unequivocally” say that Biden won the 2020 election and that Trump lost. The long-debunked election conspiracy is something that the former president continues to bring up at his campaign rallies, even a month before the 2024 election.

"See, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans. It’s a gotcha game,” Johnson said on ABC’s “This Week.” “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future. We’re not gonna talk about what happened in 2020, we’re gonna talk about 2024 and how we’re gonna solve the problems for the American people.”

If Trump started saying that the sky is purple, it would become a "gotcha question" to ask other Republicans what color the sky is. They cannot contradict him, no matter how ridiculous his statements are. And this is what Trump wants for the country.

and the Helene aftermath

Most hurricanes' worst damage comes from the high winds and storm surge near landfall, as when Katrina hit New Orleans. But Helene's most serious impacts have come from the heavy rains that it carried inland to places like Asheville, North Carolina, which sits in the Appalachian mountain range.

The confirmed death total from Helene in the US reached 227 Saturday, about half of them in North Carolina. Because they are inland and tucked into the mountains, many of the hardest-hit areas have been hard for relief workers and needed supplies to get to.

This situation has created opportunities for unscrupulous demagogues. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, has promoted the outrageous conspiracy theory that Helene was sent towards rural areas that the Biden/Harris administration doesn't care about.

Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.

The all-powerful "they". There's nothing "they" can't do. Fortunately, that charge was too crazy to catch on, and MTG's tweet mainly resulted in ridicule directed at her.

But Donald Trump's lies, echoed by many other Republicans, have been just credible enough to cause harm. Most damaging has been the claim that FEMA has run out of money because it spent it all housing foreign migrants.

At a campaign rally in Michigan on Thursday, Trump claimed that “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country.” He added in an election-related conspiracy theory, saying, “They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”

This statement packs a number of lies into a small package.

  • Noncitizens can't vote, and there is no evidence that Harris or anyone else is trying to get them to.
  • Housing for migrants is a separate appropriation from disaster relief. FEMA manages both pots of money, but keeps them separate. Nothing has been stolen.
  • FEMA has not run out of money to respond to the disaster. If the $35 billion appropriated for disaster relief runs out, Congress can pass a supplemental appropriation, which it frequently does after major disasters. (If there is any delay in that process, it will be due to Speaker Johnson.)

Spreading this kind of disinformation has negative consequences for the very people Trump claims to be standing up for: If they think there's no money, they may not apply for help they need.

And that's just the tip of Trump's iceberg of Helene-related lies. He has also falsely claimed

  • Democrats don't want to help victims in Republican areas. (Republican governors and other local officials say otherwise.)
  • Federal help maxes out at $750. (In fact, $750 is what victims can get for immediate needs like groceries, and doesn't affect their eligibility for further help.)
  • Federal helicopters aren't rescuing people in North Carolina.

FEMA is now maintaining a website to combat misinformation and disinformation like the nonsense Trump is spouting.

This is all just stuff he makes up for his own political advantage. It's further evidence of a major Harris-campaign theme: Trump doesn't care about you. He only cares about himself.


Chris Hayes' coverage of this issue is particularly good. Calling it "misinformation", Hayes says, doesn't do it justice.


Hurricane Milton is expected to be Category 3 when it hits Florida's Gulf coast Wednesday.

and the campaign

I'm looking forward to watching Kamala Harris' 60 Minutes interview tonight. Short clips are already available. Trump was offered a similar interview but chickened out turned it down.


At long last, the NYT raises the question of Trump's age and whether he is all-there mentally.


Trump and Vance are claiming they don't support a federal abortion "ban", but that's because they've started calling it something different: a "minimum national standard" on abortion.


Josh Marshall has been digging deep into the Trump get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation, which might be trying out a novel theory or might just be failing.

GOTV is an important part of the inside-baseball of campaigning. Typically, GOTV isn't about convincing people to vote for you -- that's already happened or not happened -- it's about making sure that the people who lean in your direction actually do vote. So you develop lists of people to call, looking for folks who don't always vote, but have told past callers that they favor you. (Or maybe they just look like your voters demographically). Close to the election you contact those iffy voters, making sure they know where their polling place is, how they're going to get there, and so on, offering help as needed.

By itself, GOTV isn't going to produce a landslide, but a good vs. bad GOTV operation can make the difference in a close election. That's why some Republicans have been expressing alarm about the apparent lack of a Trump GOTV push. Marshall has been trying to get to the bottom of these rumors.

What he's finding is that Trump people had a decentralized GOTV concept intended to supplement the usual door-knocking and phone-banking. But more and more it looks like the decentralized plan is replacing their traditional GOTV, which is a big gamble. Partly that's happening because the money for traditional GOTV instead went to pay Trump's legal bills.

Susan Faludi writes in the NYT about how the "protection" theme works differently for male and female candidates. Trump can fear-monger and then tell women: "I will be your protector." But a woman offering men protection runs into a deep resentment: "You cannot defend us without unmanning us."

She also notes how protection comes in two flavors: protection from threats in the real world, and symbolically acting out the tropes of strength.

The symbolic is performative. Those who crave it don’t actually want effective measures to alleviate a threat. They wish to rage against the threat, and they seek a protector in chief who validates their wrath. For them, war’s the point, not victory — outrage, not outcomes

... Time and time again, nations that have sought protection under a fantasy führer — or a real one — have reaped the whirlwind. This fall, I’m voting my fears, too, but what I fear most is the whirlwind. I’m voting my need for protection, as well. I want a Constitution protected from the paper shredders. I want democratic process and the rule of law protected from rioters and scammers. I want reasoned and stable governance, exemplified by a president whose lodestar is the well-being and security of her citizenry, not the bloodlust of his base. I want, most of all, the fate of my nation to be protected against the judgment that history’s gods level against strongman societies.

The protection theme exemplifies the often misunderstood concept of structural privilege or structural discrimination. Male and female candidates can make the same promises, but the man will be cheered while the woman provokes dismay or anger. It's not how she words or delivers the pledge, it's the fact that she's a woman.


Saturday, Elon Musk spoke (and danced wildly) at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania. I can only imagine the right-wing outrage if Mark Zuckerberg or any other social-media mogul appeared at a Harris rally.

This is a common pattern: Baseless right-wing accusations (like that social media favors Democrats) often lead to the Right blatantly doing that very thing. In the 2020 cycle, for example, Trump's false charge that Biden had stolen the election justified his very real attempt to steal it through fraud and force.

and you also might be interested in ...

Cory Doctorow uses Amazon Prime's decision to start showing its customers even more ads to illustrate the general concept of "enshittification" (a term he coined in 2022).

Every ad that Amazon shows you shifts value away from you — your time, your attention — to the company’s shareholders.

That’s the crux of enshittification. Companies don’t enshittify — making their once-useful products monotonically worse — because it amuses them to erode the quality of their offerings. They enshittify them because their products are zero-sum: the things that make them valuable to you (watching videos without ads) make things less valuable to them (because they can’t monetize your attention).


Back in the summer, Oklahoma Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters announced a new requirement that all public schools teach the Bible.

Effective immediately, all Oklahoma schools are required to incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, as an instructional support.

Now he's asking the legislature for $3 million to buy 55,000 Bibles to put in Oklahoma's classrooms. But issues of church-and-state aside, The Oklahoman found something fishy.

According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.

Almost no Bibles on the market meet all those criteria, but two do: The God Bless the U.S.A. Bible for $60 each, and the We the People Bible for $90. Both are endorsed by Donald Trump. A few months ago, BBC reported that Trump had made $300,000 from the first one.

Paying $60-$90 for a leather-bound Bible just isn't necessary. The text of the Bible can be downloaded free online, and there are a variety of free Bible apps for your phone. If you insist on a physical copy, you'll find a wide selection for less than $10. In any version, you can look at John 2:14-16 to see how Jesus felt about this kind of profiteering.

and let's close with something that turns down the voltage

You don't see a lot of cartoons based on electrical engineering concepts.

Monday, September 30, 2024

Keeping Watch

Here’s the guy that inherited $200 million. If he hadn’t inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now? Selling watches in Manhattan.

- Marco Rubio, in a 2016 presidential debate

This week's featured post is "Questions for Donald Trump".

This week everybody was talking about Helene

Hurricane Helene hit the Florida panhandle Friday as a Category 4 hurricane, then proceeded inland through Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee "causing 64 deaths and severe damage. Millions lost power, and the storm caused up to $110 billion in losses, with rescue efforts still underway in many areas."

Disaster footage hits harder when you recognize the places the news people are talking about. Here's a news clip from Asheville, NC, where I've vacationed.

There's always an argument about whether any particular storm or disaster is caused by climate change, but Helene's rapid transition from Category 2 to Category 4 is the kind of thing that didn't used to happen. Hurricanes pick up energy from warm ocean waters, and climate change has been warming the oceans.


Page 664 of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership:

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories

and Mayor Adams' indictment

The most recent Democrat to run afoul of Biden's Department of Justice is New York Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted Wednesday on five counts, revolving around bribery and illegal campaign contributions from sources related to the government of Turkey. (The NY Post had a classic headline: "Grand Theft Ottoman".) The charges go back to his term as Borough President of Brooklyn.

Adams has pleaded not guilty and pledged to stay in office.

Merrick Garland's Justice Department is supposedly "weaponized" against Republicans, but somehow they've found time to prosecute not just Adams, but also Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and Congressman Henry Cuellar, in addition to Jack Smith's indictments of Donald Trump. Maybe it's time to recognize that DoJ is just enforcing the law.

and Israel's attacks on Lebanon

Israel has followed up last week's pager-attack on Hezbollah with bombing raids against Lebanon. Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed, as well as other Hezbollah leaders and a Hamas leader in Lebanon.

As satisfying as such results are to a country at war, they tend to have little long-term impact. American attacks in Afghanistan were constantly killing high-ranking Taliban officials, and yet the Taliban won the war. Nasrallah himself replaced a previous Hezbollah commander who was killed by an Israeli raid in 1992.

As long as there is grass-roots support for resistance, new leaders will always emerge. And short of genocide, there is no purely military way to stamp out grass-roots resistance. Ultimately, peace has to be negotiated with leaders who have enough popular credibility to make concessions.

Peter Beinart:

Israel’s fundamental problem is that it’s holding millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights and there are many people all over the Middle East who are outraged by that, and some of them are willing to fight Israel over it.

That fact has military consequences, but at its root is not a problem with a military solution.

Thomas Friedman sees Netanyahu's strategy as a blunder that risks Israel's future.

Israel is in terrible danger. It is fighting the most just war in its history responding to the brutal, unprovoked murder and abduction of women and children and grandparents by Hamas — and yet today Israel is more of a pariah state than ever.

Why? Because when you fight a war like this with no political horizon for this long — one that denies any possibility for more-moderate Palestinians to govern Gaza — the Israeli military operation there just starts to look like endless killing for killing’s sake. That is just what Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran want.

The people I am quoting here are not antisemites or even anti-Zionists. They are American Jews with a strong commitment to Israel who see no future in the current Israeli policies.

and Trump jumping the shark

I was skeptical two weeks ago when Jay Kuo posted "He's jumped the shark" to his Substack blog.

Jumping the shark became a cautionary metaphor for when a show goes awry and is desperate for new ideas and ratings. And since Trump is fundamentally a television personality, and we are all living through his twisted reality show, it is notable that, in desperation over his flagging candidacy and polls showing him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris, the writer, producer and chief protagonist of Unhappy Days has now jumped the shark, too.

Kuo interpreted the eating-cats-and-dogs libel and "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!" as shark jumps, desperate pleas for the public attention Trump used to get as a matter of course. Well, maybe. Both took old reliable Trump themes -- immigrants are ruining America and outspoken women are nasty -- and turned them up to 11. But I wasn't convinced.

Lately, though, Trump himself has been convincing me. Another longstanding Trump theme has been: "I'm a billionaire. Can you send me your money?" Initially, of course, he bragged about being so rich he could self-fund his 2016 campaign. ("I don't need anybody's money.") But that didn't last, and much of that early self-funding consisted of loans that were paid back to him by red-hatters from trailer parks who sent his campaign $25 a month.

During his presidency, he continued to run businesses that at times doubled as pipelines for bribes. Want to get the President's attention? Pay a few hundred thousand to join his golf club. Stay in his overpriced hotel when you come to Washington. Hold your favor-seeking organization's executive retreat at a Trump property.

But as Election Day approaches and the possibility of permanent exile from the spotlight looms, Trump may not be campaigning that hard, but he is going all out to fleece his sheep as thoroughly as possible. The latest grifts are dialed up well past 11, to 14 or 15.

Of course there are the $500 gold (or silver, if you're not really a true believer) Trump sneakers, and the autographed Trump Bible for $1,000 -- or $60 without the signature. ($1,000 is cheap. You're thousands of years too late to get Jesus or Moses to autograph your Bible. But it's not too late for Trump.) Those have been available for a long time.

But now you can get a gold-plated coin commemorating him surviving the July assassination attempt. And $99 Trump digital trading cards that (if you buy 75 or more of them) will get you a fragment of the suit he wore when he debated Biden in June.

Even that is just chump change, though. If you're a real Trumper, how can you resist the new Trump Watch? For a mere $100K, you can get 1 of 147 numbered gold watches with diamonds. They don't actually exist yet, will probably be made in China, may not look like the ones in the ad, and Trump has nothing to do with them other than a licensing agreement and a marketing video. But they're guaranteed to be gaudy and say "Trump" somewhere. What more could you ask for?

Too rich for your blood? Get the $499 version (which The Bulwark estimates costs $60 to make; they guess the $100K watch might cost as much as $20K).

And then there are Trump investments. If you had bought Trump Media stock when it went public on March 26, you might have paid $79 a share. Friday it closed at $14.75, so your $10,000 investment would be worth $1,867. And even at that price, investment professionals warn that it's wildly overvalued.

Given that DJT’s main asset is the social media platform Truth Social, with annual revenues less than $5 million, it’s hard to validate an enterprise value above $2 billion.

Have any more capital burning a hole in your pocket? Soon you'll be able to invest in World Liberty Financial, a Trump-controlled cryptocurrency exchange that will have its own digital coin (which you could use to bribe the president should Trump manage to win the election). Now that's a sure thing if I've ever seen one.


Even Melania is trying to cash in before the windows close.


Trump has also been pushing his authoritarian rhetoric past 11. In Erie Sunday, he discussed shoplifting and other retail crime. His solution: Turn the police loose on criminals without any rules.

The police aren’t allowed to do their job. ... You know, if you had one day, like, one real rough, nasty day ... One rough hour, and I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It will end immediately.

A right-wing media-watching group says that Google's search algorithm is more favorable to Harris than Trump. Trump's reaction: Prosecute Google.

This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections. If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!

Fox News "shouldn't be allowed" to cover Kamala Harris rallies:

And then I have to sit there and listen to her bullshit last night. And who puts it on? Fox News. And they shouldn't be allowed to put it on.

And freedom-of-speech be damned; people who criticize judges he likes should be put in jail.

They were very brave, the Supreme Court. Very brave. And they take a lot of hits because of it. It should be illegal, what happens. You know, you have these guys like playing the ref, like the great Bobby Knight. These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices, trying to … sway their vote, sway their decision.

Of course, trying to intimidate a judge is exactly what he was doing during his Manhattan trial. But that's the heart of authoritarianism: For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.

and abortion

Republicans continue to discuss abortion in the most ham-handed ways. A little over a week ago, Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno said this:

You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters. Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, "Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else." … OK. It’s a little crazy by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, "I don’t think that’s an issue for you."

It's hard to beat the response of The Daily Show's Desie Lydic:

Yeah. How dare a woman who can't get pregnant care about abortion? Only men who can't get pregnant are allowed to care about abortion. People should only care about issues that effect their bodies. Why do you care about it, Bernie Moreno? It's abortion, not the rising price of extra-small condoms.

More generally, Moreno's "whenever I want" framing shows a profound misunderstanding of the whole concept of Freedom. There may be a lot of things I don't want to do at the moment. But that doesn't I'm OK with the government telling me I can't do them. For example, I may not be planning to read any of the books Moms for "Liberty" wants to ban from public libraries. But I still object to banning them, because Freedom.

And then there's this from Trump, which I'm cobbling together from two sources:

I make this statement to the great women of our country. Sadly, women are poorer than they were four years ago, are less healthy than they were four years ago, are less safe on the streets than they were four years ago, are paying much higher prices for groceries and everything else than they were four years ago. I will fix all of that, and fast, and at long last this nation, and national nightmare, will end. It will end. Because I am your protector. ... You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.

My first thought after hearing this was "These are not the droids you're looking for." Trump seems to be making a very inept attempt to do a Jedi mind-trick, and I'm not sure who he expects to fall for it. Women are supposed to forget about their right to bodily autonomy because a man (who has a long history of fraud) offers some vague promises about how wonderful he will make their lives? Who's going to buy that pitch?

and you also might be interested in ...

The Walz-Vance vice presidential debate is tomorrow night. I expect Walz to do well, but VP debates seldom move the needle.


A progressive grass-roots media group in Michigan posts a disturbing report about their experiences at a Trump rally in Warren Friday. I'm not putting too much stock in it, because it is an anti-MAGA group I've never heard of before, and they offer no video or other supporting evidence. But it's worth noting to see if it lines up with any subsequent reports.


The WaPo provides and in-depth look at a Florida woman raising a trans daughter during the DeSantis era.


In Eugene, Oregon you get three choices when you call for help from the city: Police, Fire, and CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets). If somebody is losing control and acting out in disturbing (but not obviously dangerous) ways, maybe they don't need armed police officers shouting orders at them. Some other professionals might be better trained to deal with their situation.

Here, all you have to do is press 3 instead of 1. This is what is meant by “defund the police” (a phrase that we need to eliminate asap). Diverting SOME funds away from police in order to bolster community services like this.


A Wisconsin mother explains why school shootings worry her more than drag shows.


and let's close with something memorable

In honor of Maggie Smith, who died this week at age 89, here's a collection of memorable lines she delivered as the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey.

Monday, September 23, 2024

Weak Institutions and Special Rules

I don't think anyone can dispute either of those two points: that there's been no coverage of Trump's dementia comparable to the discussion of Biden's age and that hacked Democratic campaign emails would be getting covered. That's a different standard and one that is markedly lower for Trump. It's that simple. It doesn't mean that the Times hasn't taught the public a lot about Trump. There have been a lot of revealing stories. But they are easier on Trump than on other candidates. That's how narcissistic sociopaths work. They get weak institutions to make special rules for them.

-Doug J. Balloon (NYT Pitchbot)

This week's featured post is "Squirrel!"

This week everybody was talking about keeping the government open

It looks like House Republicans aren't eager to sacrifice themselves for Trump. Trump had been demanding that any deal to keep the government open include the Save Act, requiring proof of citizenship for a person to register to vote. It's not clear what real-world problem that was supposed to solve, since non-citizen voting is already illegal and there is no evidence that law has been ineffective. But it would reinforce among the MAGA faithful the false impression that non-citizens are voting Democratic in large numbers. That, in turn, might set up all sorts of shenanigans should Trump lose again in November. Wednesday, he posted this on Truth Social:

If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form. Democrats are registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS, as we speak – They will be voting in the 2024 Presidential Election, and they shouldn’t be allowed to. Only American Citizens should be voting in our Most Important Election in History, or any Election!

Wednesday, however, Speaker Johnson was unable to pass such a resolution in the House, leaving him with no negotiating leverage against the Senate, where the Save Act is a non-starter. So yesterday he agreed to a clean continuing resolution that funds the government through December.

and attacks in Lebanon

Israel shifted its attention from Hamas to Hezbollah this week, with airstrikes on Lebanon and a sci-fi-like attack using exploding pagers.

and Mark Robinson

It's time for another round of Republican limbo: North Carolina candidate for governor Mark Robinson just set the bar lower than ever, and the GOP continues to contort its moral standards to pass under it with him.

So CNN found a bunch of messages Robinson posted to a message board on the porn site Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012. (I haven't seen them, but I am told many include disgusting images.) In the printable ones, he proclaimed himself a "black NAZI" and advocated bringing slavery back, saying "Some people need to be slaves."

Robinson denies he posted those messages, but CNN has pretty good evidence it's him. If he's being framed, somebody must have started building the frame back in 2008, when Robinson was not a public figure.

Robinson was already trailing Democrat Josh Stein by 9.4%, largely because of his penchant for ridiculously inflammatory statements, like comparing transpeople to "maggots" and "flies", telling them to "find a corner outside somewhere" rather than use a gendered bathroom, and saying that "Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down." The posts on Nude Africa are shocking at one level, but on another level they sound like him. Whatever he says, he says bigly. David French puts it like this:

No one, however, should be surprised. Even before the primary, Robinson’s horrific character was on display. Among other things, he had called school shooting survivors who advocated gun control “media prosti-tots,” accused Michelle Obama of being a man, and trafficked in so many antisemitic tropes that his election as lieutenant governor in 2020 was an alarm bell for Jewish leaders in the state.

In other words, Republican voters knew he was a bad man when they chose him. Now they know he is a very bad man.

In the pre-Trump era, something like the Nude Africa posts would have been immediately disqualifying, and members of his own party would be demanding that Robinson leave the race. But the GOP is standing by him, because the only standard the Party has these days is loyalty to Trump, who hasn't rescinded his ringing endorsements, like when he called Robinson "Martin Luther King on steroids".

Instead, Trump is pretending Robinson doesn't exist. Robinson was neither invited nor mentioned at Trump's rally in North Carolina Saturday. But Robinson's staff is running away en masse.

Chris Christie connects Robinson to past MAGA losers like Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania and Hershel Walker in Georgia:

This is the problem for us Republicans. As long as Donald Trump is your recruiting agent for candidates in swing states, we're going to continue to get our rear ends handed to us.

French thinks Trump's damage to his party goes further:

In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.

and the race

Since my state-of-the-race post last week, the national polls haven't changed much: from Harris +2.7 to Harris +2.6 in the 538 average, and Harris +1.8 to Harris +2.2 in RCP. Some of the state polls look better, particularly Pennsylvania, which went from Harris +0.6 to Harris +1.3.


Trump's response to the Harris townhall Oprah did:

When I watched her interview yesterday with a woman who is destroying, through her complete and total incompetence, America, I couldn’t help but think this isn’t the real Oprah

It's hard to tell whether "not the real Oprah" is supposed to be metaphoric or whether he thinks she's physically been replaced.


Heather Cox Richardson looks at the history of the Electoral College, and the persistent advantage it gives Republicans. Unlike some historians, she doesn't attribute the origin of the EC to pro-slavery interests, but she believes pro-slavery interests made it impossible to eliminate in the 1830s. I hadn't realized that the winner-take-all provision for each state's electoral votes (other than Nebraska and Maine) wasn't part of the Founders' original vision.

and Trump's armed stalker

It's fascinating to me how quickly the second Trump "assassination attempt" story has come and gone, except inside the MAGA information silos.

One factor is how much less the story turned out to be than the first announcement -- that shots had been fired on a course where Trump was golfing. It turned out the shots had been fired by Secret Service agents at a guy hiding in the bushes with a rifle, who never got a good look at Trump. Without the agents' intervention, it might have turned into an assassination attempt. (So the Deep State saves the day again!) But all it really amounted to was an armed stalking.

And then there were the unnecessary conspiracy theories. Like: Trump's round of golf wasn't on his schedule, so how could the would-be assassin have known? It must have been an inside job! Well, cellphone records say he had been waiting in the woods for 12 hours. If you're looking for Trump, pick out a day when he's not campaigning and stake out his golf course. How much inside knowledge does that take?

Residents say Trump spends almost every Sunday at the West Palm Beach golf club when he is not on the campaign trail.

Then there was how quickly Trump moved to take advantage of the incident. A bunch of social media criticism went something like: "The first thing I do when someone tries to kill me is send out a fund-raising email."

MAGA World's attempts to "connect the dots" with the assassination attempt in Butler in July and from there link to Harris or Biden or the Deep State or some mysterious "they" were implausibly vacuous.

They are going to keep trying to kill Trump. This is only beginning. This stops only when we win in November.

The Butler guy was a conservative gun-nut who wanted to kill somebody important. Trump appears to have been a target of opportunity. Trump's golf-course stalker is more plausibly motivated by politics, but we don't yet know how. Neither appears to have any Biden/Harris connection.

Apparently the stalker did intend to assassinate Trump, but his motives don't sound like they were lifted from any Democrat's speeches.

Trump “ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled,” the letter says.

Republicans blaming Democratic rhetoric and calling for them to "tone it down" are just laughable, when Trump continues to call Harris a Communist and say at every rally that Harris and Biden are "destroying our country". Here, in one sentence, he calls out inflammatory Democratic rhetoric while using his own:

Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country.

Trump has never once addressed the death threats his fans make against anybody who gets in his way: Judges Merchan and Chutkan, DAs Fani Willis and Alan Bragg, election workers like Shaye Moss. And he promises to pardon those convicted for committing violence in his name.

Vance complains that Democrats (truthfully) labeling Trump a "threat to democracy" is "going to get somebody killed", but then goes on to lie about Haitians eating people's cats.

It's not working for them.

and how the media covers Trump

NYT reporter Maggie Haberman was interviewed on NPR Thursday, and showed real cluelessness about why her newspaper in particular and the media in general are being criticized.

I think that the media does a very good job covering Trump. ... I think there is an industry, bluntly, Dave, that is dedicated toward attacking the media, especially as it relates to covering Donald Trump and all coverage of Trump. And I think that Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media process every day, has for years. The systems are just fundamentally - they were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he often does. I think the media has actually done a very good job showing people who he is, what he says, what he does. I think most of the information that the public has about Trump is because of reporting by the media. And I guess I don't really understand how this industry that literally exists to attack the press broadly - and the media is not a monolith. It's not a league. But this industry that exists to do that - I don't see how they think they are a solution by undermining faith in what we do. That's been very confusing to me. ... I'm talking about criticism on the left.

James Fallows responded on X by suggesting someone at the Times address the specific criticisms people are making: like why Biden's cognitive issues got highlighted while Trump's are ignored, and "Why framing / headline / social-promo of stories takes a certain shape so predictably as to have given rise to the Pitchbot".

This drew the satirical NYT Pitchbot into the discussion, which Jonathan Chait slammed as a "hacky, tin-eared comedy account". That caused the Pitchbot's author to drop his comedy mask and engage, making some very good points.

I don't think anyone can dispute either of those two points: that there's been no coverage of Trump's dementia comparable to the discussion of Biden's age and that hacked Democratic campaign emails would be getting covered. [The press has refused to publish the Trump emails Iran hacked.] That's a different standard and one that is markedly lower for Trump. It's that simple. It doesn't mean that the Times hasn't taught the public a lot about Trump. There have been a lot of revealing stories. But they are easier on Trump than on other candidates. That's how narcissistic sociopaths work. They get weak institutions to make special rules for them.

I'll add my two cents: The media in general, the NYT, and Haberman in particular have been doing a bad job covering Trump. They've been applying lower standards to him, for example, often covering what-he-meant rather than what-he-said, when they refused to give Biden that consideration. Lots of serious journalists like Fallows have noticed, as well as humorists like the creator of the NYT Pitchbot. It takes real arrogance to lump together the people who notice your failings and dismiss them as "an industry dedicated to attacking the media".

and you also might be interested in ...

The Federal Reserve finally has started cutting interest rates, signalling that it believes inflation is no longer a major threat to the economy.


In Brazil, Elon Musk and his X social media platform have been fighting the law. The Guardian reports: "The law appears to have won."

The platform bowed to one of the key demands made by Brazil’s supreme court by appointing a legal representative in the country. It also paid outstanding fines and took down user accounts that the court had ordered to be removed on the basis that they threatened the country’s democracy, the New York Times reported.

Musk had been resisting removing the accounts (basically for denying that former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro had lost his reelection bid) citing his commitment to free speech. However, he only seems to resist requests from liberal democratic governments. He has been much more cooperative with the governments of Turkey and India, the article notes.


If you want to dig into the nuts-and-bolts of creating a sustainable economy, particularly how that economy will generate and distribute electric power, you should be reading David Roberts' "Volts" blog on Substack. (Like most Substack blogs, Volts will ask you to subscribe, but let you read the content even if you don't.)

I don't quote Volts that often, usually because it delves deeper into the details than this blog ought to. But one recent post worth your while is his interview with Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden's Council of Economic Advisors and the chief economist for his Invest in America Cabinet. She's discussing the "$910 billion in announced investments all across the country in semiconductors, clean energy, manufacturing, batteries and EVs, bio-manufacturing, heavy industry, and clean power" that has come from the big bills Biden got passed before Republicans took over the House: the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS Act.

What I find interesting here is not so much the specifics as the public/private investment approach she describes. As she puts it: "Markets don't always deliver optimal outcomes. But, on the other hand, markets are amazing." Markets themselves are neither blind nor all-wise, but they do certain things very well. Government incentives should lay out the playing field, but private-sector players should play the game.

It seems to be working. The public investment capital is drawing in many times that much in private investment. New productive capacity is being built and jobs are being created -- many of them in the parts of the country that need jobs most. The public investments are not just in basic research -- a role Roberts notes that even many libertarians endorse -- but in opening the bottlenecks that keep research advances from being implemented.

Interestingly, this public money is turning into the exact opposite of patronage. By targeting areas that have suffered from disinvestment and job flight, the Biden administration has wound up channeling most of this investment money to Republican counties.

and let's close with something graphic

When I joined BlueSky, not that many people were on it yet. So the first people I followed were just about anybody I had heard of, like comic-book creator Kurt Busiek ("Astro City"). From there, by following people other people followed, I wound up with a social-media feed very different from what I see on X: odd and creative and whimsical.

That's how I discovered Sarah Andersen. Sarah's cartoons tend to be witchy, cat-oriented, and just slightly dark. I've been enjoying them.

Monday, September 16, 2024

Positive Influences

Haitians are — culturally, my wife Fran and I have seen this when we’ve been down in Haiti — education is prized. So when you look at all of these things, people who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield, and any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.

- Mike DeWine, Republican Governor of Ohio

This week's featured posts are "Where the race stands" and "Lessons from the Haitian Fright".

This week everybody was talking about the debate

One featured post discusses where the race stands post-debate. This note is just about the debate itself. [video, transcript]

All week, MAGA has been throwing stuff at the wall to try to explain how their God-Hero got completely outclassed by a Black woman he has claimed is "dumb as a rock". So far I've heard:

  • It didn't happen. Trump actually won. But apparently that story wasn't convincing even in MAGA-World, so they also had to come up with explanations for Trump's defeat.
  • The moderators were against him. It wasn't fair to fact-check him more just because he lied more frequently and more outrageously than Harris. Moderators should have sat there stone-faced when Trump claimed babies are being executed after birth, immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, or that Trump was being "sarcastic" when he admitted that he had lost the 2020 election.
  • Kamala must have gotten the questions ahead of time. Obviously there is no way Harris could have anticipated that she would be asked about inflation, abortion, immigration ...
  • Kamala's earring was really an earphone. I suspect this claim is motivated by jealousy. Trump's handlers wish he had been wearing an earphone, so they could have kept yelling "Forget about crowd sizes! Get back to inflation!"
  • Kamala was using witchcraft. Seriously. Lance Wallnau, the so-called "father of American Dominionism" detected the "occult empowered deception, manipulation, and domination" on Harris' side, and believes that "something supernatural needs to disrupt this counterfeit momentum". Clearly we need to throw her in a lake and see if she floats. This theory has one advantage over all the others: It explains why Trump floundered. (How could Harris knowing the questions cause Trump to sound like a raving lunatic?) But if Kamala is secretly the reincarnation of Marie Laveau -- I can sort of see a resemblance -- it all makes sense. He rambled and told outrageous lies not because he's old and his brain never did work very well, but because she cast a spell of confusion on him. [BTW: MAGA really should thank me for doing that bit of historical research. If it catches on, we'll know they read the Sift.]

Trump managed to pull a bunch of that together into this totally sane and rational Truth Social post:

ABC FAKE NEWS has been completely discredited, and is now under investigation. Did they give Comrade Kamala the questions? It was 3 on 1, but they were mentally challenged people, against one person of extraordinary genius. It wasn’t even close, as is now reflected in the polls. I WON THE DEBATE!

About the polls ... well, no, they don't say Trump won the debate. But why would Trump start telling the truth at this late date?


My favorite post-debate meme went something like: "No wonder Trump thinks Harris is a Marxist. She just publicly owned him."


Trump has taken a lot of well-deserved ridicule for claiming to have only "concepts of a plan" on healthcare. (He's been using that phrase at least since 2019.) Paul Krugman explains what's going on here: The "phenomenal" healthcare plan Trump has been vaguely discussing since 2015 provides affordable coverage to all Americans. But there are really only two ways to do this:

  1. The government insures people directly, as in Bernie's Medicare for All proposal.
  2. The government subsidizes private insurance, as in ObamaCare.

Trump has repeatedly said these options are both "disasters", so he's stuck. He can fantasize about having an all-singing all-dancing program that solves everybody's problems. But there's no way to flesh out that fantasy, so it never develops beyond a "concept".

BTW: Trump's "concepts of a plan" flashed me back to a party scene in "Annie Hall", where you overhear some random guest saying: "Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea."


The eating-cats-and-dogs thing grew into its own featured post.

and shots fired on Trump's golf course

We don't know much yet. Sunday, Secret Service agents clearing the hole ahead of Trump spotted a gun barrel in the bushes. They engaged a man who ran away. Reportedly, shots were fired, but whether any were fired by the man in the bushes or just by the agents is unclear. Trump was unharmed. The man, a White American, is now in custody. He appears to be strongly pro-Ukraine, but it's not clear whether that was his motive in stalking Trump.

Trump supporters online have been irresponsibly linking this apparent assassination attempt to the previous attempt, and blaming both on a mysterious "them". Here's Marjorie Taylor Greene:

They are trying to kill him!!! They will do anything to stop him from winning.

As a firmly anti-Trump liberal, let me say this: I don't want him killed and I'm glad nothing came of this attempt. I want Trump discredited, not dead. I want to see him defeated in the election, and I want him to get fair trials on his indictments. If he does go to trial again, I will be rooting for him to be convicted and sentenced to jail. But I don't want him killed. A Trump assassination would probably only unleash something worse on America.

and Laura Loomer

I've decided not to touch the rumors that Trump and Loomer are having an affair. Too often, when a woman rises to some form of prominence, hostile people claim she must be using sex somehow. It's wrong when Trump says it about Harris, and it's wrong here too.

But I don't need to lose my PG-13 rating to criticize Loomer, or to criticize Trump for associating with her. Last week, Loomer responded to a Kamala Harris tweet celebrating her Indian grandparents with a blatantly racist post:

If @KamalaHarris wins, the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.

That was too racist even for Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lindsey Graham. Always quick to take the high road, Loomer responded to Graham by asking him when he was going to come out of the closet.

The Bulwark's Sam Stein observed that if Republicans are worried about Trump being influenced by a conspiracy theorist, that ship sailed a long time ago. He provided a long list of Trump-promoted conspiracy theories going back to Vince Foster's suicide and questioning whether Osama bin Laden had really been killed.

Marcy Wheeler points out that the Loomer problem is the same as the Putin problem: Trump can be manipulated by flattery.

The problem isn’t Laura Loomer. She’s little different than all the other extremists who remain in Trump’s good graces by performing near-perfect sycophancy. The problem is precisely what Tim Walz warned: Trump’s narcissism and his ego make him weak, vulnerable to any person willing to use flattery to win their objectives. Trump’s aides are making the same argument Tim Walz is: that Trump doesn’t have the self-control to protect against extremists making him their ready tool.

and you also might be interested in ...

Just in case you had any doubt that Trump takes everything personally, he posted "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT" to Truth Social Sunday morning. I love the response from never-Trump Republican Rick Wilson:

Invading Moscow in the winter, fighting a land war in Asia, and going up against the Swifties. These are well regarded as key strategic mistakes in history.

And speaking of Taylor, I am struck speechless by Elon Musk's offer to "give you a child and guard your cats with my life". Usually when I see some outrageous statement, I can imagine some situation or some state of mind where I might be tempted to say something similar. But I've got nothing here. I have no idea what Elon could have been thinking.


In my post about the Haitian Fright, I forgot to mention a Chicago hotdog shop's attempt to make commercial hay out of the controversy:


Don't have time to read the Project 2025 manual? Listen to the song instead.


Various people have speculated that Republicans drummed up the Springfield pet-eating story to distract from something else. Here's one possibility: The Republican candidate running against Sherrod Brown for the Senate has been lying about selling off his business interests, and also about having an MBA.

But I find myself agreeing with David Roberts:

It is getting very difficult to determine which MAGA fiasco is supposed to be a distraction from the other MAGA fiascos.

and let's close with something visual

Some while ago I did a closing featuring a Dad who photoshopped his kids. It seems he's still at it. Here we see a demonstration of a basic principle of physics: Actions produce equal and opposite reactions.