Strudel Poodle

 

Not much information, perhaps, but plenty of kürtőskalács. Via Taste Atlas.

I don't know if Roy, Left Blogistan's preeminent Rod Dreher scholar, has seen this testimony of what Dreher did on his three-month Hungarian junket, so I want to make sure it gets posted somewhere:

Dreher, who we caught in  early August complaining about how the Western press smears Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán as a fascist when they don't bother to learn the first thing about what Orbán has actually done—

this write-by-numbers Atlantic piece on how the 2022 election might be the last time to stop Hungary from turning into an Orban autocracy. It’s typical of the coverage you see in the Western media: no interest at all in trying to understand the nuances of the issues in play. It’s all Magyar Man Bad. As I have said repeatedly, if you come to Hungary with an open mind, and spend any time, you may not come away thinking pro-Orban thoughts, but you will come away realizing that the situation here is far, far different from the picture you see in the Western media.

—hasn't bothered to learn the first thing about what Orbán has actually done.

I mean literally: Rodsplaining Hungarian freedom of expression to Hungary's only remaining independent media outlet:

This One Weird Trick

 

On Monday, Robert Kuttner/The American Prospect reported a really interesting little development in the reconciliation negotiations: the idea for a kind of finesse that would allow both Senator Manchin and the House progressives to claim a victory.

The idea his Hill sources were telling him about involved a key element of the Build Back Better proposals, the extension of the American Rescue Plan's one-year fully funded child tax credit for $3000 per child ($3600 for a child under six), the second installment of which went out to households yesterday, and which is temporarily cutting our child poverty rate by nearly half. The House Ways and Means proposal is to keep it going through 2025 and then reduce it to $1000, which would be a shame (reducing the reduction in child poverty to 8%), but making the full credit "permanent" (i.e., though 2030) would cost another $700 billion.

For the Record: Big Buttons and Illegal Orders

Trump and His Big Buttons, via the Australian site Green Left.

With reference to what is presumably the finale of Bob Woodward's Trump Trilogy, Fear (2018), Rage (2020), and now Peril (to be released next Tuesday), now featuring a collaborator in the person of a WaPo colleague, Republican whisperer Robert Costa—

The advance promotion of the book from CNN offers a pretty interesting story of the very last days of the term, following the episode, just after the election, where Trump signs an order to withdraw all the US troops from Afghanistan before Biden's inauguration, by 15 January, as we've sort of known since May. Among other things, it's done in secrecy from the government, under the urging of Stephen Bannon, who's back in the scene urging Trump toward the real coup, and in tandem with the firing of defense secretary Mark Esper and all sorts of attendant intrigue in which Trump seems to be trying to seize some kind of power over DoD. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and some others are able to stop the precipitous move in Afghanistan (if you think Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan three months after the agreed date was dangerously rushed and poorly planned, you'll agree that this proposal was at least a couple of orders of magnitude worse), but Milley is spooked by this evidence of Trump's ability to sneak around the normal channels, while CIA director Gina Haspel is suspecting Trump could order an attack on Iran, and going on to ask, "He is acting out like a six-year-old with a tantrum... This is a highly dangerous situation. We are going to lash out for his ego?"

Literary Corner: Vulnerable to the Reliability

I call this his "deer in the headlines" look. Via Fox News.

If the Supreme Court really comes up with a way of finding the Texas Posse Postcoitum Act constitutional, I'm going to demand that New York State enact a bill deputizing private citizens to enforce libel law by filing suits against liars on behalf of reality itself, and spend the rest of my life hunting bounties, $10,000 at a clip from all the Republicans I can catch. 

I'm not sure I'll go after Senator Manchin, because his stupid act is getting so convincing I'm not at all sure he's lying, as in this interview with Dana Bash at CNN:

The Urgency That We Have

by Joseph Manchin III

What's the urgency? What's
the urgency that we have? It's not
the same urgency that we have
with the American Rescue Plan. We
got that out the door quick, it was
about $2 billion — $2 trillion. And
on top of that, all the things we
have got with the CARES package,
everything leading up to that. So,
we have done an awful lot and there's
still an awful lot of people that need help.

But you have 11 million jobs that aren't
filled right now. 8 million people are still
unemployed. Something's not matching up.
Don't you think we ought to hit the pause
and find out? The vulnerability that we have,
Dana, right now, we don't know what is happening
with this COVID. It's awful, coming back
the way it is with a vengeance. And
we don't know about inflation. We know
it's running rampant right now. I can tell you,
in West Virginia, inflation's running rampant.

And, on top of that, the challenges we're
going to have, geopolitical challenges.
Shouldn't we be prepared?

1/6 Is What They Claimed 9/11 Was

 

Confederates under General Jubal Early in Maryland, getting uncomfortably close to the Capitol in 1864. Via Smithsonian.

With regard to that Spencer Ackerman op-ed ("How Sept. 11 Gave Us Jan. 6") that Steve is talking about this morning, I have a narratological take: namely, that Ackerman is right to bring the episodes of 9/11 and 1/6 together, but does it the wrong way when he treats one as the cause and the other as an effect. Ratherm, they belong to two entirely different stories, in paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic relation (that is, to be compared, not connected), and what we can learn about one from the other is not what Ackerman thinks.

The story of 9/11 is the story that begins in the years from 1979, when the USSR lost its war in Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards took the hostages in the US embassy, to 1990, when Saddam Hussein attempted to conquer Kuwait as the USSR hurtled toward dissolution; it's the story of how the American rightwing sought an enemy to replace the Cold War Soviets and discovered it in militant Islam. It was a terrible story, in its ignorance of the diversity and conflict among Muslims and its narcissistic certainty that everything is "about us", but when Osama bin Laden finally succeeded in destroying the World Trade Center in 2001 it seemed, for a while, to be really true.

No True Religionist

 

Painted lacquer basket from an Eastern Han tomb of what was the Chinese Lelang Commandery in what is now North Korea (1st-2nd century B.C.E.), illustrating historical paragons of the virtue of filial piety. Via Wikipedia.

David F. Brooks is shocked-shocked to find that authoritarians have been using religion as a justification for their abusive ways, not only in places with actual dictators like Russia and China, but right here in the United States of America! Luckily, he quickly realizes that the ones in the US and Germany are basically faking it ("When Dictators Find God"):

Even wannabe authoritarians in America and Western Europe are getting in on the game. The international affairs scholar Tobias Cremer has shown that many of the so-called Christian nationalists who populate far-right movements on both sides of the Atlantic are actually not that religious.

They are motivated by nativist and anti-immigrant attitudes and then latch onto Christian symbols to separate “them” from “us.” In Germany, for example, the far-right group that aggressively plays up its Christian identity underperforms among voters who are actually religious.

I don't know how carefully Brooks read the linked thing, but it wasn't actually so much about the far right as the normal conservatives, the Christian Social Union (CSU) of Bavaria, which is partnered with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of the other 15 states, Chancellor Merkel's party, and which has been known for its  strict adhesion to Roman Catholic social policy (there aren't a lot of Protestants in Bavaria) since its founding in 1945. That's 73 years when the party's faithful Christianity was never questioned, up to the 2018 state legislative election when it found itself threatened by the neofascist Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD):

Playing Position

 

Via.

Shana Tova and happy Labor Day! I'm upstate enjoying some R&R including some woods (lovely, dark, but fortunately not that deep), and trying not to worry about the Wall Street Journal story, of which I've only seen Steve's report, suggesting that the Democrats are going to give up on tax justice as they work through the reconciliation instructions to spend that $3.5 trillion, which I'm guessing (see above) wouldn't make them feel too sad over at WSJ. 

Nobody else seems to have been picking up on it—I mean, within our own bloggy circle, or out there in the magazines we read—and it's consistently remarkable how little discussion there is anywhere of the tax side of the Biden program, which I myself, as you know, am obsessed with. That is, I get why Democrats might be leery of talking about it, knowing how Republicans would be inclined to manipulate the discussion, as they normally do, making it sound like everybody's taxes are set to go up, as opposed to a relatively small portion of the top 2% (an individual earning $387,116, where the 98th percentile starts, won't see a rise in income tax, nor will a couple in the 99th percentile at $531,020; and you have to be earning $1,000,000 to get hit by the rise in the capital gains tax to a marginal rate of 39.6%). But Republicans aren't on the whole talking about it either, not the politics of it, neither concern trolling ("our Democrat friends will regret this gigantic assault on the middle class") nor handicapping its chances in Congress in the way WSJ just broached.

Shit Show

 

Photo via Curious Historian.

Looks like the only Trump business that isn't falling apart is grifting from Republicans: the Washington hotel is empty, and though they've found another broker to try to sell the lease ($3 million a year), they've lowered the asking price from $500 million to $400 million and still found no takes after two months, they're under legal attack in New York and Washington, and, in the latest, tenants in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue can't pay their rent:

Inside Trump Tower, swank suit-maker Marcraft Clothes once rented the entire 18th floor, outfitting its offices with fireplaces, mahogany-lined closets and two bars for schmoozing customers.

But then Marcraft fell $664,000 behind on rent and went out of business last year — its assets having dwindled to $40.75 in a checking account and “1,200 damaged coats,” according to court filings.

One floor up, a business school once led by Kardashian family matriarch Kris Jenner was consumed by lawsuits, falling $198,000 behind on payments to Trump Tower by October 2020, according to court papers. And on the 21st and 22nd floors, the company that made Ivanka Trump shoes racked up $1.5 million in unpaid rent, according to a lawsuit that the Trump Organization filed this year.

But there's one tenant, this WaPo story says, that's definitely paying its bills: the Make America Great Again PAC, which took over space on the 15th floor previously occupied by the Trump campaign in March, for a monthly rent of $37,541.67, though nobody is known to actually do anything there.