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.
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