The Weekly Sift

Monday, September 2, 2024

Cornerstones

It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today: the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of middle-class security all bear the union label.

- Barack Obama

This week's featured posts are "Can Trump Steal Georgia?" and "A Week in Trump's Declining Spiral".

This week everybody was talking about Trump's downward spiral

As I explained in the Teaser, I didn't really set out to write two Trump articles this week. I planned the Georgia article, but then as the week went on, there was some new Trump outrage every single day. This summary was getting swamped with them, so I moved them all to their own article.

and the Harris interview

Wednesday night, CNN aired a much-ballyhooed interview (transcript, video parts 1, 2, 3) where Dana Bash asked questions and Kamala Harris and Tim Walz answered them. The Democratic ticket survived the interview without blundering, but overall the interview just underlined the point I was making two weeks ago: Mainstream political journalism is broken. Answering their stupid questions does nothing to serve the cause of democracy.

Bash spent the interview asking Harris and Walz to respond to baseless accusations Trump and Vance keep making. Basically, she was playing the role of the trouble-making gossips I knew in junior high. ("Do you know what Marcy is saying about you?") I find myself agreeing with Jeff Tiedrich (who elaborated in more colorful language than I'm going to use here):

“Tim Walz lied about IVF” is a right-wing talking point. “Kamala Harris isn’t really Black” is a right-wing talking point.

pestering Democratic candidates about right-wing talking points is not journalism. it’s being a Republican tool.

The exchange that sums up the interview is this one:

BASH: Speaking of Republicans, I want to ask you about your opponent, Donald Trump. ... He suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity.
HARRIS: Yeah.
BASH: Any—
HARRIS: Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please. (LAUGH)
BASH: That’s it?
HARRIS: That’s it.

Bash may have been surprised by Harris' dismissal of her question, but did it deserve any lengthier answer? Like a junior-high gossip, wasn't Bash angling for Harris to insult Trump in some way she could then carry back to him? ("Kamala Harris says you're a racist. How do you respond to that?")

Even the questions that sounded substantive really weren't. For example, Bash started the interview with: "What would you do on Day 1?"

Day 1 is only interesting when there is a change in parties, because -- unless the new president wants to be a dictator, as Trump has said he does -- the only possible actions are executive orders that reverse the previous administration's orders. So Biden's Day 1 was significant because he

rejoined the Paris Climate Accords
reversed Trump's Muslim ban
stopped construction on Trump's border wall
reversed Trump's moves to disengage from the World Health Organization.

Harris doesn't have any similar night-and-day disagreements with Biden's orders. Everything she has been talking about -- restore the protections of Roe v Wade, safeguard voting rights, restore the child tax credit, build more affordable housing, subsidize first-time home buyers, shift some of the tax burden from the middle class to the very rich, pass the border bill Trump had his minions in Congress block, etc. -- requires the cooperation of Congress, which isn't going to get any of it done in one day.

Bash knows this, so why is she asking? To set up critical headlines, like Politico's "Harris Dodged Questions About Her Day One Plans". (Politico's article went on to describe the dramatic actions five presidents took on Day 1. All five, of course, replaced presidents from the opposite party.)

How do maneuvers like this serve the voters, or democracy in general?

Asha Rangappa posts an interesting analysis of why Harris dismissed Bash's turned-Black question, and how this tactic is driving Trump nuts.

Rangappa points to the Karpman Drama Triangle, which simplifies interpersonal conflicts down to three roles: persecutor, rescuer, and victim. From time to time Trump takes any of the roles, but his goal is always to wind up as the Victim, as in "I did everything right, and they indicted me."

By saying "Next question, please", Harris is refusing to strike back at Trump and give him something to play the Victim over.

In contrast to their criticism of Harris for avoiding interviews, the media often gives Trump credit for responding to questions. But they never ask him anything hard, like: "What were you planning to do with the classified documents you were keeping at Mar-a-Lago? And why did you tell the government you had given them all back when you hadn't?"

They don't ask such questions because they know what the response (which doesn't qualify as an "answer") would be: "That's a nasty question. You're the fake media."

Let's be honest: When Trump faces real questions, he never answers them. To this day, he hasn't given a coherent response to the charges in any of his four indictments. (Instead, he attacks the prosecutors, the judges, the FBI, the witnesses, the jurors, and the Biden administration. He makes sweeping denials like "I did nothing wrong." But he never addresses the evidence against him.) He complains that the media doesn't tell his side of the story, but that's because he has never settled on a single story to tell.

In view of all the stuff Trump has gotten away with (so far), I have to laugh at the attempt to drum up some Lilliputian Harris scandal. This week's attempt: She claims she worked at McDonalds, but never listed it on a resume. Does anybody applying for a job after law school list their fast-food summer jobs on their resumes?

The media often digs into the nuts-and-bolts inside-baseball of campaigning -- fund-raising, polls, ads, strategies -- but presents a very naive view of governing. They want a detailed picture of a candidate's policy proposals, as if presidents were kings who could simply decree those proposals into law.

That's how you get questions like Bash's "The steps that you’re talking about now, why haven’t you done them already?" A bunch of those "steps" -- codifying Roe v Wade protections, passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, passing the border bill, restoring the child tax credit -- have gone to Congress and been blocked by the House Republican majority. Others, like shifting the tax burden from the middle class to the billionaires, stand no chance of getting Republican support.

Every administration's policies are a compromise between the president's vision and what can get through Congress. Implicit in all of Harris' proposals is the assumption that Democrats will hold the Senate and regain the majority in the House.

During its first two years, when it had slim Democratic majorities, the Biden/Harris administration managed to get done an amazing number of things -- far more than Trump -- like funding infrastructure (which Trump kept promising but never accomplished), and beginning to transition away from a fossil-fuel economy that is leading to a climate-change apocalypse (a transition Trump wants to reverse with a drill-baby-drill policy, which somehow will make bacon cheaper). But no, they weren't able to implement the full Democratic change agenda. During the last two years, they have artfully kept MAGA nihilists in the House and Republican partisans on the Supreme Court from undoing all that progress, but they haven't managed to push further.

In this environment, ten-step plans are beside the point. Voters need to understand the sharp contrast in the underlying values of the two parties.

Women have rights vs. wombs belong to the state.
Save the planet for future generations vs. drill-baby-drill.
Stand up for democracy vs. give in to Putin.
Focus policy on the middle class vs. cut billionaires' taxes and wait for prosperity to trickle down.
Support the rule of law vs. let presidents commit crimes and become autocrats.

How many details do you need to pick a side?

and the hostages

Six more Israeli hostages were found dead in Gaza over the weekend. According to AP:

Three of the six hostages found dead — including an Israeli-American — were reportedly scheduled to be released in the first phase of a cease-fire proposal discussed in July.

The deaths sparked massive protests in Israel yesterday, with protesters charging that the Netanyahu government is not doing enough to get the remaining hostages returned. The nation's largest union has announced a nationwide general strike to begin this morning.

The Biden administration perpetually claims to be on the verge of getting a hostages-for-ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, but something always falls through at the last minute. Naturally, each side blames the other for not negotiating in good faith and not really wanting peace. It is difficult to criticize one side without seeming to endorse the other.

According to local authorities, more than 40,000 Palestinians have died as a result of the fighting in Gaza. It is never clear how many of them were Hamas warriors and how many were civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time.

and you also might be interested in ...

I've been wondering for some while about the persistent charges that Democrats support "abortion after birth". Since I've never seen a Democrat endorse the idea, or heard any examples of an after-birth abortions happening somewhere, I've assumed these are just lies.

But lies are usually based on something, even if reality has been grossly distorted by the time the claims get made. I think I've finally found the something in this case.

Back in 2022, California passed a law AB 2223, which protected women from prosecution after miscarriages.

The law came in response to the prosecution of two Kings County women who were criminally charged after having miscarriages. Though charges in both cases were dismissed, one woman spent 16 months in jail and the other spent nearly four years. The Kings County District Attorney has vowed to bring new charges in one case, according to CalMatters. According to Wicks’ office, at least 1,300 people have been criminally prosecuted for having miscarriages, stillbirths or self-managed abortions in the last 20 years.

AB 2223 and its author drew heavy criticism from the conservative anti-abortion movement, with some organizations, such as the California Family Council, alleging that the bill would effectively decriminalize infanticide. That is not true. The law does prevent pregnant people from being criminally charged in the event that an infant dies due to pregnancy-related causes. It does not decriminalize the killing of infants.

So if a miscarriage or self-managed abortion results in a baby who is alive but fatally damaged, the woman can't be charged if the baby dies from that damage.

Other states have since passed similar laws, resulting in the after-birth abortion rhetoric.

I still haven't got a handle on the feud between Elon Musk and Brazil's supreme court. But this week it led to the court ordering Brazilian ISPs to block the Twitter/X platform.

The dispute stems from X's usefulness as a tool for spreading dangerous disinformation, like bad health advice or incitement to political violence. Brazil demanded that X block certain disinformation-spreading accounts, which Musk called "censorship" and refused to do.

I'm sure many other countries are also worried about X and disinformation, so they are watching to see how this plays out.

Back in the 2000 campaign, Republicans would sum up Bush's charm advantage over Gore by asking which candidate you'd rather have a beer with (ignoring the fact that Bush was a recovering alcoholic who couldn't drink any more). In 2024, I propose a different test: Who would you rather go to the state fair with?

and let's close with something that takes training

Throwing out the first pitch is a longtime baseball ceremony that is typically used to call attention to some local celebrity or community leader. Some honorees wilt under the pressure of being watched by thousands, and bounce the ball to the plate or toss it so wide of the mark that it can't be caught.

But Wednesday, Shohei Ohtani's dog Decoy delivered a memorable first pitch for a game between Ohtani's Dodgers and the Baltimore Orioles. With Shohei behind the plate, Decoy squatted on the pitching rubber waiting for the sign, then picked up the baseball with his mouth and delivered it directly to his master, dropping it onto home.

Shohei also had a good game, hitting a home run and stealing two bases.

Monday, August 26, 2024

Estimation

Never underestimate a public school teacher.

- Tim Walz

This week's featured post is "The Convention That Ate Republicans' Lunch".

This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention

The featured post focuses on how the DNC reclaimed Reagan-era values that Republicans have stopped taking seriously or have let drift away from American reality: freedom, family, marriage, tradition, masculinity, and what makes someone American.

I know I mentioned this in that post, but it deserves a second plug: One standard element of a political convention is the roll call of the states as the delegates announce their votes. The DNC did it a little differently from the RNC.

The DNC turned roll call into a dance party, with each state choosing music appropriate to itself, like Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" or Illinois choosing Alan Parson's "Sirius", the walk-on music the Chicago Bulls use when they play in that same arena. My own state, Massachusetts, picked the Dropkick Murphy's "I’m Shipping Up to Boston". But Georgia stole the show by getting Atlanta's Lil Jon to perform his own "Turn Down for What".

One difference between the conventions the featured post didn't cover: The RNC's message centered on hero-worship: America is in terrible shape, but if we elect Donald Trump again, he will save us. The DNC was more of a pep rally for activists. Speaker after speaker urged the delegates (and by extension those watching at home) to "do something": volunteer for the campaign, send money, make sure your friends are registered to vote. Kamala Harris will not save us by herself; her campaign is the vehicle through which We the People will save ourselves and each other.

I've never seen condoms used for political advertising before.

Major media fact-checking during the conventions was somewhere between comical and infuriating.

If you're a person actually interested in the truth, the main thing you need to know about the Democratic Convention speakers is that they were far and away more truthful than the Republican speakers. Nothing at the DNC rivaled the big lies that form the scaffolding for MAGA policies: the "migrant crime wave", or that illegal immigrants are voting, or that other countries are emptying their jails and insane asylums to send their unwanted people to the US.

None of that is even remotely close to being true.

But both-sides-ism decrees that fact-checkers had to flag Democrats for something. So when Tim Walz said that "IVF and fertility treatments" are "personal for Gwen and I", USA Today had to point out that the Walzes' daughter Hope resulted from a different fertility treatment than IVF, as if IVF hadn't been the next option, and as if succeeding before reaching that point would give the Walzes less empathy with infertile couples who do need IVF. In short: Nothing Tim said was wrong or needed correction.

Or when Pete Buttigieg said that "crime was higher on [Trump's] watch", USA Today found it important to point out that not all crime rates were higher all the time. So the murder rate (which rose under Trump) continued rising for Biden's first year before falling to a level below where it was at the end of Trump's term.

And when Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker said "Donald told us to inject bleach" as a Covid treatment, that was "misleading", because Trump only made that ridiculous suggestion as something scientists should waste their time investigating.

Bill Clinton said that since the end of the Cold War, 50 million American jobs have been created under Democratic administrations and only 1 million under Republican administrations. PBS rated that only "mostly true", because even though what Clinton said was exactly right, 1989 was a particularly fortuitous time to measure from. Starting the clock running somewhere else might give less lop-sided results.

Summing up: While Republicans told big whopping lies that they can't justify their policies without, Democrats sometimes failed to include all the footnotes a journal article would require.

It seems like a conscientious fact-checker would want to note that distinction. But AP's headlines looked like this:

Good lines from the convention that I haven't found another place for. D. L. Hughley:

Republicans for Kamala? I guess Donald Trump will finally know what it's like when you get left for a younger woman.

Ted Lieu:

As a computer science major, I am so impressed by how large this AI-generated crowd looks tonight.

Hakeem Jeffries:

Donald Trump is like an old boyfriend who you broke up with, but he just won't go away. Bro, we broke up with you for a reason.

Pete Buttigieg:

JD Vance said 'if you don't have kids you have no physical commitment to the future of this country.' When I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn't have kids then. Many of the men and women with me didn't either. But let me tell you, our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical.

Raphael Warnock:

We believe that a patient's room is too small and cramped for space for a woman, her doctor, and the United States government. That's too many people in the room.

and RFK Jr. endorsing Trump

Friday, Robert Kennedy Jr. announced that he was suspending his campaign and supporting Donald Trump.

No one should be surprised by this, because RFK Jr.'s campaign was a Trump operation from the start. The Kennedy name was supposed to divide the Democratic vote, which is why RFK Jr.'s campaign was funded by pro-Trump donors and pushed by pro-Trump media. But recent polls had begun to show Kennedy pulling more votes from Trump than from Harris, so it was time to pull the plug.

On paper, this looks to favor Trump, but it also ratifies Harris/Walz framing: Trump, Vance, and Kennedy are all weird, so of course they would wind up together.

I've seen lots of triumphal posting by Trumpists, claiming that this is a big development that nails down Trump's election. But Nate Silver is unconvinced. His model has Harris up 4% with her convention bounce just starting to show up in the data. Her margin drops about 0.3% when Kennedy is taken out.

and the horse race

I'm not going to pay much attention this week, because if Kamala gets a bounce out of the convention, it won't show up fully in the polls until at least next week. But generally, her slow and steady momentum has continued. 538's polling average has her up by 3.4%, which is close to where she needs to be to overcome the Republican advantage built into the Electoral College.

But there is reason to expect a convention bounce. Here, a CNN reporter is stunned that 6 of the 8 undecided voters he talked to in November have decided for Harris. One has decided for Trump and one still isn't planning to vote.

and you also might be interested in ...

Maybe "Communist" and "Marxist" don't mean what Trumpists think they mean.

and let's close with something cold-blooded

OK, I've heard of support dogs, cats, and even monkeys. But a support gator? I'm picturing a bumper sticker: My support animal can eat your support animal.

Saturday, August 24, 2024

Strong Leadership

Over the last several years there's been this kind of perversion that has taken place, which is to suggest that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down, when what we know is the real and true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.

- Kamala Harris

This week's featured post is "Harris, Trump, and Our Broken News Media".

This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago has already started, if you count events that don't usually get much coverage, like the delegate breakfasts. Main programming begins at 4 this afternoon, central daylight time. This livestream link begins at 5:30.

Politico has a good article about the convention, including the various ways you can watch it. The major networks are only committed to an hour of coverage 10-11 each night, but CSPAN and various streaming options should cover everything.

Tonight's headliners are President Biden, who I expect to get a heartwarming reception from a party that appreciates what he has sacrificed for the greater good, and Hillary Clinton, who may finally see her dream of a female president realized this year. The Obamas will speak Tuesday. Wednesday's lineup includes Tim Walz, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, and Pete Buttigieg, while Thursday belongs to Vice President Harris. Jason Carter at some point will appear on behalf of his grandfather Jimmy Carter, who is hoping to hang on long enough to vote for Harris in the general election.

This convention will contrast with the Republican Convention in a number of ways that I think will work in the Democrats' favor. For one thing, the party is not running away from its past, and its nominee has the support of all its major stars. And while the RNC tended to be dour and dystopian, the DNC should be much lighter and joyful.

Also, the Democratic headliners are just better speakers. I expect that Walz on Wednesday and Harris on Thursday will each have a point and make it, in a speech that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They should contrast well with Trump's 90-minute ramble at the RNC, and whatever it was that J. D. Vance was doing.

The wild card in the week is how intense and disruptive pro-Palestinian protests will be.

and Ukraine's invasion of Russia

On August 6, Ukraine flipped the script on Russia and sent its troops into Russian territory in the Kursk region, which is famous as the site of the largest tank battle in history. (The Russian victory over Germany at Stalingrad is considered the greatest single turning point in World War II, but Germany's defeat on the Eastern Front didn't become inevitable until after Kursk the next summer.)

It's hard to know what this all means. A substantial fog of war prevents accurate reporting, but it's clear that Russia was surprised and has not been able to repel Ukraine yet. The attack could turn out to be anything from a strategic masterstroke to a modern-day Gettysburg campaign that has early successes but ultimately hastens defeat.

In the meantime, it's a substantial political embarrassment to Putin, whose image of strength is taking damage.

and Gaza

The dying continues in Gaza, and the Palestinian death count has now passed 40,000. The Biden administration continues to push for a ceasefire/hostage release deal, but it's not clear that either side really wants peace.

and you also might be interested in ...

It's always hard to decide how much attention to pay to the latest Trump outrage. It's important not to become desensitized to them, but they've been going on for nine years and haven't ended his career yet.

This week he disrespected Medal of Honor winners, who are America's greatest war heroes.

Trump on Thursday, when talking about giving GOP donor Miriam Adelson the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s top civilian honor, said it is “actually, much better” than the Medal of Honor “because everyone (who) gets the congressional medal of honor, that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”

Trump's former Chief of Staff, former General John Kelly, responded:

No president, member of Congress, judge or political appointee — and certainly no recipient of the Presidential Medal — will ever be asked to give life or limb to protect the Constitution. The two awards cannot be compared in any way. Not even close.

Trump's remarks would be bad enough in the context of a Medal of Freedom winner who saved many lives through peaceful means, like vaccine developer Jonas Salk, or who risked life and limb in a non-military context, like first man on the Moon Neil Armstrong. But it's obscene to say such a thing while giving the award to Miriam Adelson, who essentially bought the honor by (with her late husband) contributing hundreds of millions to Republican candidates, including Trump himself.

I discussed Trump's Mar-a-Lago press conference in detail in the featured post, and barely mentioned his interview with Elon Musk. CNN did a fact check, for what that's worth. But their discussion of climate change is worth paying attention to, because it so clueless. Bill McKibben dubbed this "the dumbest climate conversation of all time".

Trump said the same stupid thing he's said before, which is that rising sea levels aren't worth worrying about because you just wind up with "more seafront property". Not only is this wrongheaded, it's just plain dumb, as McKibben points out:

a rising ocean clearly reduces the amount of oceanfront property. If Florida goes underwater there will be a new stretch of seafront along what’s now the Georgia border—but the amount of oceanfront will be greatly reduced.

But most of the truly idiotic comments come from Musk, while Trump just sits there and seems to agree. Musk is pushing electric cars not because he worries about the climate, but because he worries about running out of oil. Also, he pictures increased CO2 in the atmosphere not causing any real problems until it gets around 1000 ppm (from it's current level of just over 400), because that would cause breathing problems.

McKibben comments:

There is not a serious climate scientist on planet earth who has ever contemplated a thousand parts per million with anything less than panic and horror. ... What Musk’s math implies, of course, is that we have endless time to deal with this crisis. If 1,000 is the danger level, and we’re going up two parts per million per year, that does indeed “give us quite a bit of time.” Three hundred years, roughly. ... This is the point of their conversation, at least when it comes to climate. It is to insist that nothing need be done now, that we should just go on expanding the fossil fuel industry.

Social media is trolling Musk: "Elon Musk, dead at 52, says there is no need for misinformation laws".

Sexism is sexism, even if it comes from a woman. I am appalled that the WaPo published a Kathleen Parker column including this:

Without her beauty, Harris might be joining Biden in retirement. All you have to do is imagine her spoken words coming from a less-attractive package. Or put her on radio.

Hillary wasn't attractive enough. Kamala is too attractive to take seriously. There's no winning.

Tim Walz hasn't forgotten how to speak to a football team. Decades ago, politicians of both parties made these kinds of speeches all the time to promote civic virtues in the rising generations. But it's been a long time since I've heard one.

The DeSantis takeover of New College in Sarasota hasn't resulted in book burnings, but a lot of gender diversity books that students might have wanted are winding up in the dumpster

and let's close with some resemblances

James Lucas posts a thread on X that celebrates pareidolia, "our brain's tendency to see familiar shapes in random patterns", like the Waterfall of the Bride in Peru.

Monday, August 5, 2024

Denial

No Sift next week. The next batch of new articles will post on August 19.

I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?

- Donald Trump

When prejudice cannot deny the black man’s ability, it denies his race.

- Frederick Douglass

This week's featured posts are "Where Did Inflation Come From?" and "The Unfathomable Mystery of Biracial Americans".

This week everybody was talking about getting prisoners out of Russia

Thursday, President Biden announced a multi-country swap of prisoners that brought home three Americans: WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, and Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. Whelan had been held the longest, since 2018.

The swap relied heavily on US allies. Germany, Slovenia, Estonia, Poland, Norway, and the Maldive Islands released prisoners Russia wanted back. In his announcement, Biden underlined the importance of having allies, a backhanded slap at Trump's anti-NATO sentiments.

If Trumpers wonder why calling him "weird" is catching on, they should look at his first reaction to the prisoner swap, which he had said could not happen until he was reelected (apparently because he's Putin's pet).

So when are they going to release the details of the prisoner swap with Russia? How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash?

At some point, questioning the details of the swap is legitimate. But surely the first reaction of any non-weird American was to be happy for fellow Americans who are free now, and for the families who can welcome them home. Trump expressed none of this, but (without knowing any of the details) simply assumed the deal must be bad because it worked against his political interests. He doubled down during his Atlanta rally Saturday.

I would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal.

Didn't every American other than Trump feel at least a little joy in their hearts for their freed countrymen? That's the kind of thing that makes him weird.

Of course there's speculation about what this means politically in the US. Back in May, Trump posted that he would get Evan Gershkovich released "almost immediately after the election", and that Putin "will do that for me, but not for anyone else". Some people at the time interpreted this as Putin's ransom demand: If you want to get Gershkovich back, elect Trump.

But after this week's deal was announced, Slate's Fred Kaplan speculated:

[L]ike most world leaders, Putin has no doubt been reading the polls, and he may have concluded that Trump is not going to win ... Therefore, Putin might have reasoned, it’s better to take a deal now so it looks as if he’s acting without an eye to our election.

However, I wonder if there's another angle: Maybe our allies were willing to sacrifice more for Biden, in order to make it less likely Trump will ever be restored to power.

and Trump's interview with Black journalists

That's the topic of one featured post. A few related things didn't make it into that article.

John McWhorter's analysis of why Trump mispronounces "Kamala" is interesting. He relates it to previous generations of American mainlanders calling the 50th state “Ha-WHY-a” and its capital "Honolula", or misnaming foreign foods "raviola" and "guacamala".

The Trumpian attitude toward Harris’s Indian name reanimates an old American trope. Instead of opening up to a foreign word and even exploring it a little, Trump is treating it as an alien presence in need of assimilation, telling it to conform to whatever he decides it should be.

This willfully blasé attitude toward the word’s pronunciation has the effect of othering it, and Harris by extension. A name with no set pronunciation is alien, exotic, unplaceable — and therefore not who we are. It’s a subtle dig that aims in the same direction as Trump’s false rumor that Barack Obama wasn’t American.

A subtle detail in a scene from the recent movie American Fiction sums up something important about race in America. The main character, Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, is a Black author who doesn't want to be defined by his blackness. (He wants to write literature, not Black literature.)

Early in the movie, he is coming out of an airport while talking on the phone to his agent about his unwillingness to write the stereotypic "Black novel" the market wants from him. "You know," he says, "I don't even believe in race."

"Unfortunately," his agent replies, "other people do." And as he says that, a cab drives past Monk to pick up a White man.

A question White conservatives ask constantly is "Why do Blacks (or Democrats or liberals) make everything about race?" That scene is the answer: Black people may try to forget about race, but the world will remind them.

and the rising Iran/Israel friction

I don't claim to understand this, so I'll point you to The Economist's article.

and Venezuela

Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro allowed an election, appeared to lose it, and has announced victory. Now he's cracking down on protesters and opposition politicians.

and J. D. Vance continues to embarrass Republicans

Outrageous things Vance has said continue to surface. In a 2021 interview on the Dear Ohio podcast of Spectrum News 1, while he was running in the Ohio Republican primary for the Senate seat he now holds, Vance was asked "Should a woman be forced to carry a child to term, after she has been a victim of incest or rape?" He replied:

I think the question betrays a certain presumption that's wrong. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.

In other words, a woman should be forced to carry her rapist's baby, but that's an inconvenience. It's not the important thing about the situation. Also, this requirement makes rape a viable reproductive strategy for men, but that's not important either.

I noticed something in that interview that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere: Vance repeatedly uses the word normal in a way that I find creepy. The first question is why he wanted to run for the Senate, and Vance says

I think normal people in this country, people who want to live a good life, who just want to raise their families, they deserve somebody who fights for them.

Normal comes up several times throughout the interview, and it always refers to people like Vance himself. I find myself wondering what percentage of the country Vance considers normal.

Another clip that has resurfaced was his opinion of Simone Biles after she withdrew from the 2020 Olympics for mental health reasons.

What I find so weird about this, and it reflects on the media more than it does on Simone Biles, is that we’ve tried to turn a very tragic moment — Simone Biles quitting the Olympic team — into this act of heroism. And I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we try to praise people not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments

Peter Thiel is the tech billionaire who made Vance. The WaPo summarizes their relationship:

Thiel made him wealthy, setting him up to invest in companies that became popular with the MAGA set. He shepherded Vance’s entry into politics, bankrolling, alongside other Silicon Valley donors, his successful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2022.

An amazing clip is circulating on social media, in which Thiel compares present-day America to pre-Nazi Germany, but without any sense of alarm about it.

Liberalism is exhausted. One suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted. And we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton Window.

Before passing that on, I felt obligated to search for the context. I found it here: an hour-and-a-half dialog with Tyler Cohen, who I don't recognize. I haven't looked at the whole thing, but the immediate context of the quote is a little better than it sounds. They're discussing the German philosopher Carl Schmitt (who I also don't recognize). He accurately predicted the fall of democracy in Germany, but "things went very haywire" (according the Thiel) when he got "somewhat entangled with the Nazis". Thiel describes that entanglement as "bad judgment".

So Thiel's not openly espousing fascism in that quote, but I still can't be comfortable electing the protege of someone who suspects democracy is exhausted. And my overall feeling is: God save us from billionaires who want to raise questions "very far outside the Overton Window".

and the horse race

Who you think is ahead right now depends on which polling average you trust. They are all close, and they all show Harris gaining. RCP has Trump ahead 0.8% in a two-way race, down from 1.9% last week. In a five-way race (including RFK Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornell West), Harris is ahead by 0.2%. Nate Silver's average has Harris up 1.4%; Trump was ahead by 0.4% a week ago. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Like everybody else, I'm wondering who Harris will pick as VP. But I don't see much point in writing about it, because I'm sure the decision is already made and we'll find out soon enough.

One striking thing about Donald Trump is that so many of the Trump administration veterans who know him best oppose his candidacy: Mike Pence, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, and many others.

The same observation extends to his family. His niece Mary has long been a critic, and recently her brother Fred has told negative stories about Donald in a book. Here, Mary defends Fred against an attack by their cousin Eric.

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Being accused of being weird has gotten under MAGA skins in a way that fascist and racist never did. And yet they keep acting weird.

Normal Americans find inspiration in the Olympics, and cheer for the great athletes who represent us: Simone Biles, Katy Ledecky, LeBron James, and many others. But Trumpers have a weirder reason to pay attention to the Olympics: They need something to get outraged about.

Look at what has gone viral in MAGA-Land: Anger at female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who defeated her Italian opponent in 46 seconds. Khelif was identified as female at birth and has never professed to be anything else, but she was disqualified from the 2023 world championships after the amount of testosterone in her blood exceeded some limit. The Olympics has different standards, which she fulfilled. She does not physically stand out from other women boxers, and is not the favorite to win the gold medal in her weight category.

But to Trump and his minions, Khelif is "trans". Trump posted a video of Khelif's bout with the comment:

I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!

In his Atlanta rally Saturday night (where the crowd was noticeably smaller and less energetic than the one Harris drew to the same arena a few days before), he lied outright about Khelif.

It was a person that transitioned. He was a good male boxer.

If having more testosterone than the average woman makes you a man, then all those low-T men -- you must have seen the TV commercials for supplements -- are actually women.

More weirdness is the way that Trump cheers any bad news for America. Today, he's glorying in the stock market plunge -- even though the market is still much higher than when he left office. At the end of the day, check the value of your 401(k), and reflect on how happy Donald Trump is about your loss.

For reasons that defy explanation, Trump has been going after Georgia's popular Republican Governor Brian Kemp, both on Truth Social and during his Atlanta rally Saturday night. But here's the line that really slays me:

He should be seeking UNITY, not Retribution

Look back at my article on his convention speech, which was billed as a "unity" speech. The only unity Trump recognizes is submission to him.

It's too soon to tell yet how big a deal the Trump/Egypt bribe story will be.

and let's close with something tasty

I promise not to mix politics and the closing very often, but here's something I want to pass on. In one of the featured posts, I linked to a video from Kamala Harris' 2020 primary campaign where she made masala dosa with actress Mindy Kaling, who is also Indian-American.

It turns out that was a regular thing in her campaign, and not restricted to Indian people or Indian food: She'd go meet with supporters and cook something. "Cooking With Kamala" is a 7-video series on her YouTube channel. In this one, she visits the chair of her Iowa campaign and teaches her how to make apples with bacon. Kamala attributes the recipe to her mother, who must have picked it up after she came to America. (In the Mindy video, she says her grandmother was a strict vegetarian.)

Monday, July 29, 2024

Forward or Back?

Make America great again.

- Donald Trump

We are not going back.

- Kamala Harris

This week's featured posts are "The Harris Surge" and "Couches, cat ladies, and J. D. Vance".

This week everybody was talking about the Harris surge

That's the subject of one featured post. Here's something I left out of that piece: Fox News' Brian Kilmeade criticizing Kamala for speaking to 6,000 members of the historically Black Zeta Phi Beta Sorority rather than attending Netanyahu's speech to Congress.

She'd rather address, in the summer, a sorority -- a colored sorority. Like she can't get out of that.

This segment of Nicole Wallace's show demonstrates what Harris candidacy means to Black people and especially Black women. Erin Haines describes Republican's racist attacks on Harris as "a train that is never late".

The segment replays part of a Harris interview:

So here's the thing about breaking barriers. Breaking barriers does not mean that you start on one side of the barrier, and you end up on the other side. There's a breaking involved. And when you break things you get cut. And you may bleed. And it is worth it every time.

Maya Wiley responds:

We have been cut. When she says that ... we have lived that cut as students at Ivy League schools. We lived that cut when we were lawyers standing in front of a judge that said "Where's the lawyer?"

And she calls out the sense of "victimization" Trump keeps appealing to:

People who are victimized by fairness. Who are victimized by competition from the competent. And who are upset because they have for so long gotten to be mediocre and rise.

The whole thing is worth watching.

and J. D. Vance

the subject of the other featured post. And I didn't even get around to mentioning this weird conversation he had on a podcast in 2021. He claimed "a core part of what's wrong with journalism in America" is that female reporters are panicking about their biological clocks running out. And then this:

they're all fundamentally atheist or agnostic. They have no real value system.

Because to him the only values are Christian values. If you don't have those values, you don't have any values.

and Trump's "You won't have to vote any more"

A mistake journalists and pundits often make with Trump is to hear what he says and think: "He couldn't possibly have meant that." Then they search for some less threatening interpretation, and claim that's what he must have really meant.

Well, this weekend I caught myself about to do the same thing. Friday, Trump spoke to Turning Point Action, a political group of right-wing "Christians" [About that: How much of the Sermon on the Mount would they reject as "woke"?] founded by Charlie Kirk. He said that Christians needed to get out and vote for him just this once.

You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.

That sure sounds like he's confessing to exactly what his enemies charge: If he gets another term, democracy will be over in America. Nobody will have to vote any more.

But then I thought: No, he must not have meant that. He must be talking to Christians who usually ignore politics, telling them that they should make an exception this time. (Even that isn't a very positive take: He's pitching his message to people who think democracy is a burden; they should vote for him so they can slough off the chore of self-government.)

But he said what he said. He should have to explain it, not me.

As he so often does, Pete Buttigieg had the perfect response when he talked to Jen Psaki yesterday: "I don't want to have to worry about what he means."

Marcy Wheeler traces how the NYT covered this speech: Its initial headline was about Trump calling Harris "a bum". Only after the won't-have-to-vote clip caught fire on social media did the NYT mention it -- in paragraph 14, with the explanation I suggested above.

As he so often does, Trump wants it both ways on his failed assassination: He wants to brag about "taking a bullet for democracy", but he doesn't want to provide any transparency about his injuries. (In recent appearances, his ear looks fine.)

Predictably, the NYT completely ignored the transparency issue and did its own analysis to back up Trump's claim about the bullet. The FBI later said more-or-less the same thing, though they left open whether he was hit by a whole bullet or just a fragment of one.

This is the result of Trump successfully working the refs: He has complained so loud for so long about "the fake news media" that the NYT is too intimidated to apply the standards every other politician is subject to.

Appallingly, the Times' editorial board then framed transparency as a both-sides issue, and called on Harris to make the first moves: "she needs to do more, and she needs to do it quickly".

Trump won't release the real ER report on his injury, so somebody made one up. It's fake, but I love it.

and Elon Musk

Elon had a bad week. On Tuesday, Tesla announced that its second-quarter earnings dropped 45% compared to last year. It was bad news in two ways: the number of cars sold was down 4.8%, and profit on each car dropped as well, as the company had to cut prices on some models. Tesla, which the market treats as a growth stock, saw its shares drop from around $250 to $225. Musk owns over 700 million shares, so his net worth went down nearly $18 billion. The shares still sell at over 60 times earnings (more than double the market average), so there's still a long way to fall if growth doesn't resume.

Tesla has a number of problems, starting with increased competition in the electric-vehicle market, and including the Cybertruck, which is looking like an Edsel-level blunder. The company's fantasy of self-driving robotaxis continues to recede into the future. But Musk himself has also become a drag on Tesla, as liberal electric-vehicle buyers are turned off by his increasingly fascist social-media presence.

Last month, Tesla shareholders approved a plan to grant Musk tens of billions of dollars worth of additional stock options, under the implied threat that he might take his future ideas elsewhere. If those ideas are anything like the Cybertruck, the company will be sorry it didn't let him go.

Musk's personal image took yet another hit this week, as his 20-year-old trans daughter responded publicly to comments he had made about her Monday in an interview on Jordan Peterson's podcast. Musk told Peterson that his "son" was "dead", "killed by the woke mind virus", and that Musk himself had been "tricked" into approving gender-affirming treatments.

Thursday, Musk's child, Vivian Jenna Wilson, gave an interview to NBC News.

I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged. Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.

Wilson, who had her name legally changed two years ago to disassociate herself from Musk, described him as "absent", "cruel", and "cold". Looking at what he said, it's hard to argue with her.

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Last Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. That record lasted until Monday. 2024 has consistently broken temperature-on-this-date records, and now that we're getting into the hottest part of the year it's breaking all-time records.

"Librarians are my suspects ...". This is the world MAGA is building.

Jess Piper, who writes the blog "The View from Rural Missouri", which I have linked to in the past, got swatted on Tuesday. One of her posts had drawn the ire of Libs of TikTok, which Wikipedia defines as "a handle for various far-right and anti-LGBT social-media accounts operated by Chaya Raichik". A few days later (a correlation whose causality is impossible to prove), a deputy sheriff interrupted her gardening to inform her that the sheriff's office, and several other law enforcement entities in the area, had received an email. The local water department had gotten a letter.

The email claimed to be from a close family relation. The letter stated that the family member had murdered me and my husband the night before. It went on to state that they intended to shoot and kill anyone who came on the property.

Needless to say, Jess was fine, and so was everyone else in her household. The point of a hoax like this is to provoke police to come into the situation with guns blazing, and maybe kill the unsuspecting target or her loved ones. Failing at that, the person being swatted should be terrorized, maybe so terrorized that she'll stop doing, saying, or writing things that far-right or anti-LGBT people find offensive.

It might have worked, but for the fact that Jess really does live in rural Missouri, where local authorities know most of the long-term residents. So the deputy sheriff decided to drop in on his neighbor rather than call in a SWAT team.

It sounds like the terrorizing part of the plan didn't work either.

In the end, this is the time in which we live. The internet has allowed me to find a following with like-minded people. It’s allowed me to organize across the state and remind people that folks like me exist in rural spaces. A whole lot of us live here and it’s getting out. We are contesting more rural seats and this will lead to more Democratic wins in my state.

But, with the good comes the bad. I have folks threaten me on a regular basis and now it has escalated to a swatting. But, I can’t bend to fear and I can’t stop the momentum we are building. So, I move on. We move on.

We lock arms. We do this together. I could not organize without support.

BTW: I notice Jess made an appearance across the river in Quincy, Illinois, my home town. She reports that Democrats in rural areas and small towns are just as energized as they are everywhere else.

Watch these clips of Don Jr. interviewing Vance and see what you think about those drug use rumors.

I just noticed Betsy McCaughey showing up as a panelist on CNN. Betsy is the well-known liar who is most famous for starting the death-panels hoax against the Affordable Care Act. Shame, CNN.

and let's close with something big and loud

I can't say elephants share my musical taste, but they're clearly playing something.

Monday, July 22, 2024

Resolutions

Friends and Fellow-Citizens: The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.

- George Washington
The Farewell Address, 19 September, 1796

This week's featured post is "The Two Kinds of Unity".

This week everybody was talking about Joe Biden's decision

Yesterday, Joe Biden announced that he is ending his candidacy, but will continue as president to the end of his term. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place. He promises to make a formal address to the nation later this week. (He's been in Delaware recovering from Covid. I suspect he wants to be more recovered and back in the White House before he makes the address.)

I have a million reactions, but let's start with this: Can you imagine Donald Trump ever, under any circumstances, doing something that selfless? Despite the pressures brought to bear on him, if Biden had stood his ground, he would not have been denied the Democratic nomination. And despite all the recent pessimism, the fall election was still virtually a toss-up. Polling averages had Biden around 3% behind, which is not much at this stage, especially considering how late-deciding voters broke for the Democrats in 2022. So he is giving up a very real chance to continue as president for another four years.

But that scenario also includes a substantial risk of Trump being elected again, which would be a disaster for this country. So Biden is stepping aside. As historian Jon Meacham wrote in today's NYT:

By surrendering the possibility of enduring in the seat of ultimate power, Mr. Biden has taught us a landmark lesson in patriotism, humility and wisdom.

Trump could never do that. He showed on January 6 that he would risk pulling the whole country down around him in order to stay in power.

Then we come to Kamala Harris. Biden has endorsed her, and so have a few key Democrats like Rep. James Clyburn. More importantly, none of the frequently mentioned competitors has stepped up to challenge her.

The media is spinning all kinds of theories about the process for choosing a nominee, and salivating over the prospect of the first contested convention in many years. But I refuse to speculate until some major candidate other than Harris steps forward. For weeks we've been comparing Biden to Somebody Else, and that kind of conversation needs to stop. If you can't identify who Somebody Else is and point me to the place where they have announced their candidacy, I don't want to hear it.

The Democratic Convention starts in Chicago on August 19. A "virtual vote" was supposed to happen sometime in early August, because of an Ohio deadline that could have kept the Democratic nominee off that state's ballot. But Ohio has since changed its rules, so that's not necessary any more. That vote, though, has neither been scheduled nor called off, so we'll see what happens.

These are maddening times to watch the news networks, because we all want to know what's going to happen, but nobody can tell us. So the airwaves are full of speculation that is mostly baseless. I advise ignoring it: Tune in occasionally to see if there's any actual news, but turn the TV off as soon as the talking heads start speculating. You'll be happier and saner.

Also ignore the polls for at least a week. Harris-as-candidate will poll differently from Harris-as-possibility. Maybe better, maybe worse. (I notice myself feeling more excited about her than I thought I would.) Wait and see.

A few speculations are worthwhile: anticipating attacks on Harris, as Judd Legum and Kat Abu do. Abu's take is particularly interesting: She thinks the Right has wasted four years when it could have been assembling a supervillain image of Harris, a la Hillary Clinton. Instead, they've just painted her as ditzy, which definitely should make swing voters see her as the lesser-of-evils compared to Trump. They'll undoubtedly try to paint a new supervillain image of her, but it won't penetrate as well as it would have if it had been marinating for four years.

Dueling ads are already out: an attack ad against Harris blaming her for covering up Biden's shortcomings, and a pro-Harris ad billing her as "the anti-Trump". "She prosecuted sex predators. He is one."

Josh Marshall:

Donald Trump and [Trump campaign adviser] Chris LaCivita are about to hit Kamala Harris with an avalanche of racist and sexist attacks and a ton of slut-shaming. Democrats across the board need to be saying now what we all know, which is that this will bring out the very worst of Trump. Racism and sexism are his brand. Charlottesville is his brand. You can’t just be on the receiving end of this stuff. Trump is about to show the kind of gutter white nationalist and racist pol he is. Force the press and all observers to see this totally predictable move through that prism. ... Of course Trump will go there, and these attacks and those attacks can be very damaging. But Trump the racist bully and gangster is what kills him in the suburbs. It’s what embarrasses people.

One thing Biden's decision does is put the too-old-to-be-president shoe on the other foot. Trump is 78, which means that in four years he'll be older than Biden is now. Unlike Biden, he's fat, out of shape, and eats a lot of junk food. Like Biden, his mental acuity is dubious. His proposed VP is 39 and has been a senator for a year and a half, during which he has accomplished essentially nothing. That VP, who very well could be president soon if Trump wins, has no other experience in public office.

I'm reposting a David Roberts quote from a few weeks ago:

So, say Biden stepped aside in favor of Harris tomorrow. How long until the vapid gossips we call political reporters find something wrong with her, some alleged flaw they just have to write 192 stories about? ... About 30 f'ing seconds, is my guess.

The NYT in particular is worth watching. It has been running a dedicated campaign to push Biden out since ... I don't know, around March at the very latest. Will they be happy now? Will they finally start covering Trump's inadequacies with the intensity they deserve? Or will they wait a week or so and then go after Harris just as hard as they went after Biden?

and the Republican Convention

The Republican Convention in Milwaukee just ended on Thursday, but it already seems like very old news. The featured post discusses Trump's record-long acceptance speech, which was billed as a call for national unity. The media has been describing it as two speeches at war with each other: a unity call followed by Trump's usual divisive rhetoric.

But I think they're missing something: What Trump means by "unity" is that his opponents give up and submit to his domination. Once you understand that, the two halves of the speech fit together perfectly: He will be a president "for all America" as soon as all Americans shut up and get in line behind him.

Oh, and the speech was full of lies, as CNN's fact-checker pointed out.

J. D. Vance's acceptance speech centered on the kind of false populism he specializes in:

We're done catering to Wall Street. We'll commit to the working man.

But Trump contradicted that sentiment at his first post-convention rally in Grand Rapids:

I love Elon Musk. ... We have to make life good for our smart people, and he's as smart as you get. But Elon endorsed me the other day. And I read ... [that] he gives me $45 million a month.

That's how it works in TrumpWorld. He'll be "committed to the working man" until that man's boss writes him a check.

The Convention's most vivid Party-of-Dumb moment came when Don Jr.'s girlfriend Kimberley Guilfoyle said:

It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don't recognize our country any more.

All over America, US History teachers were covering their faces and shaking their heads. The heroes who stormed Normandy were fighting Nazis. The Communists were our allies in that war.

Guilfoyle's historical rewrite got me wondering: Do Republicans even recognize any more that the Nazis were the bad guys? Present-day Nazis are MAGA now, so the idea that Americans could have been fighting them in World War II seems unthinkable. Near the end of Trump's speech, he recalled glorious past battles from our history: "Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Midway". Midway, a battle against the Japanese, not the Nazis. By itself, it's a trivial thing, but the pattern seems worrisome.

and the Trump shooting

When I wrote last week's blog, the shooting was still too new for there to be many reportable facts. There had been a shooting and Trump got hit, but he was OK. A few other people were wounded and one had died. The shooter, a 20-year-old White guy, was also dead. That was pretty much it.

Now we know a bit more: Trump was barely injured at all. His ear wound didn't even require stitches. The ear bandages his cultists wore at the convention reminded me of the purple-heart band-aids Republican conventioneers wore in 2004, to minimize John Kerry's war wounds. Then they were trying to make something serious look trivial; this time they wanted something trivial to look serious.

A lot of investigating has happened since last week, but nothing has come out that fits into a convenient narrative. The shooter was into guns, and had some vaguely conservative views, but wasn't particularly active politically. The lack of obvious hostility towards Trump

has left authorities puzzled about a motive for his assault and has had investigators speculating that his intentions may have been less politically motivated and more about attacking the highest-profile target near him. ... In addition to the former president, Crooks had searched online about President Joe Biden and had photos on his phone of other prominent figures from both parties. He searched for the location of Trump’s rally as well as the upcoming Democratic National Convention, the briefing notes say, and discovered that Trump planned to appear just an hour’s drive away from his home in the Pittsburgh suburbs. That suggests Crooks may have been looking to carry out a high-profile shooting, and the Trump event’s proximity and timing offered the most accessible opportunity, federal officials have speculated.

The New Yorker's Jay Caspian Kang suggests that the shooting may have no real political effect, for precisely that reason:

When an act of violence doesn’t lend itself to a clear argument or a tidy story, we often choose not to think about it.

and J. D. Vance

To my surprise, I discover I have a public record when it comes to J. D. Vance: In 2016 I reviewed Hillbilly Elegy for UU World magazine as part of a batch of white-working-class books.

Vance and I are both from what I like to call the "transitional class" -- people who grew up working class but got an education and are professional class now. (I became a mathematician while Vance became a lawyer.) Though we went different ways both politically and religiously, I thought Vance's book was a credible account of how a transitional class person might become a social and religious conservative:

Realizing how close he came to having no one who cared about him, he values traditional notions of duty—holding a marriage together, taking responsibility for children—over individual fulfillment. His feelings about government come not from the military or the state university that helped him, but from the foster care system that he feared would take him from his grandmother and give him to strangers. When as a teenager he reconnected with his father, he found a man who had converted to conservative Christianity and established a new family blessedly free from drinking, daily screaming arguments, and violence. Vance’s adult religion, though conservative, seems to be less about theology or salvation than about the hope of establishing such islands of peace and sanity in an unstable world.

As for who Vance has become since, I turn to two men of his generation also from the center of the country: Pete Buttigieg and Trae Crowder. "I knew a lot of guys like J. D. Vance," Pete says in his trademark blunt-but-not-nasty style.

When I got to Harvard I found a lot of people like him, who would say whatever they needed to to get ahead. And five years ago that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican, so that's what he was. ... Five years later, the way he gets ahead is that [Trump]'s the greatest guy since sliced bread.

Pete compares Vance to Mike Pence, who similarly started out with one set of principles -- Evangelical Christian moral rectitude -- and then spent down his credibility making excuses for Trump's immoral behavior. Pete notes how that ended "with Trump supporters proposing that he be hanged for using the one shred of integrity he still had to stand up to an attempt to overthrow the government". Pete expresses his hope that things work out better for Vance "maybe not as a politician, but as a human being".

As for why Silicon Valley billionaires support J. D. Vance (Peter Thiel is Vance's biggest political donor) and Trump (Elon Musk is giving millions to Trump's SuperPAC) in spite of otherwise being pro-science, anti-climate-change, pro-gay-rights, and libertarian rather than authoritarian, Pete says:

We've made it way too complicated. It's actually super-simple. These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich men.

Trae Crowder, the "liberal redneck", is even less generous, seeing Vance as someone who has sold out the people they both claim to represent. His rant is entertaining, and more fun to watch than to read.

and you also might be interested in ...

A half-written article that keeps slipping from week to week as more urgent news erupts is "The Mythical Trump Economy", about nostalgia for pre-Covid America, which fundamentally has nothing to do with Trump or his policies. In the meantime, look at the WaPo's "Trump's Economy vs. Biden's in 17 Charts".

I also still haven't found time to read Judge Cannon's dismissal of the stolen-documents charges against Trump, the most obviously open-and-shut case against him. Here's the analysis on Law Dork:

It’s a weak-on-the-law ruling for which Chief Justice John Roberts deserves a not insignificant amount of blame — despite his name not appearing once in her 93-page opinion.

Roberts has led the Supreme Court into an era in which precedent can selectively be ignored, eviscerated, or overruled when it gets in the way of conservatives’ goals. That, in turn, has led lower court judges to feel that they have been given power to do the same — predicting, in essence, the precedents that they believe the current court would ignore.

This is not how the law is to work. And yet, one need only glance through Cannon’s decision to see that reality at work Monday in her effort to do Trump’s bidding.

Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghait:

We know from studies of authoritarianism that the more despondent and despairing people are, the more they become dependent on the promises of a savior, someone who's going to save the nation. They become prone to accepting conspiracy theories. They don't know what's true any more, so they need an anchor, and that anchor would be Trump. So be very wary when you hear these slogans designed to discredit democracy and designed to convince people that America is failing.

Aaron Rupar posts a clip of Trump praising authoritarian leaders, concluding with:

We have to have somebody to protect us. And Orban was right: We have to have somebody to protect us.

Amanda Marcotte:

We asked RNC attendees when America was last "great." Regardless of age, most said when they were children. Says nothing about America, but lots about conservative psychology.

A Salon newsletter article fleshes this out:

As one commenter on Tik Tok aptly noted: "I'm amazed at the grown men who don't understand that life was simpler when they were children because they were children."

and let's close with something fake

Sometimes you just can't let the facts get in the way of a good story. When a flaw in a Crowdstrike security update crashed Microsoft systems around the world, somebody created a fake image of the Blue Screen of Death filling the Las Vegas Sphere. Snopes declared the rumor false.