Collective Effervescence

 

Margaret Mead Green in Theodore Roosevelt Park, Manhattan, with the new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation looming in the background. Photo by Alvaro Keding for American Museum of Natural History.

Sunday morning, after the spectacular finish of the NBA final, I was in the greenmarket outside the American Museum of Natural History, being an out-there citizen for once and helping to pass out fliers for one of the candidates in the Democratic primary for New York's 12th congressional district, Micah Lasher, who I regard as the natural successor of the departing Jerry Nadler, if you need to know—the museum entrance on that block of Columbus Avenue is the way to an early voting location, so the point wasn't so much to give them another flier (incredible amounts of money are being spent in this campaign, and we've been getting five or ten of them every day in our mailboxes) as just to remind them of our candidate's name, in case they were there to vote. 

Lasher and Nadler were there, a block or so away from my station, and I went down there to be introduced and shake their hands. When I got back, there was a Black lady sitting on one of the park benches outside the museum, taking advantage as I was of a bit of shade from the trees in the Margaret Mead Green (a little meadow park where we used to wander freely before it got fenced in some years ago, making room for the bright white shotcrete wildness of the Gilder Center), and talking with great animation on her cell phone about what a great day it was and how she just had to get outdoors and into the atmosphere of the city, and I thought how wild it was that I knew exactly what she was talking about—the Knicks—and felt similar. Then a little old white lady in a respirator mask came and sat down beside her and they began to engage in more Knicks conversation, which got into still more metaphysical territory with the discussion of civic unity and the sense of some kind of redemption. And lastly she went off to finish her shopping and the original lady was greeted by a couple of friends talking about plans for the day; one of them, a big bald Black man with a gray beard and extraordinary resonant voice, was recognizably the wonderful writer Jelani Cobb. I, standing there with my fliers, in a green shirt in the sea of orange and blue, on a different errand, was shy enough already, and this made me shyer, so I kept quiet and focused on the customers, who were hardly making eye contact, though every once in a while one of them would give me a thumb up or whisper, "Already voted for him," but I certainly did all the same feel myself to be a full participant in the Jalen Brunson communion that was bringing us all together, what Émile Durkheim called the "opposite of grief", a "collective effervescence" that can help to restore social solidarity following a collapse. 

Beutlerian Jihad

T-Shirt by BumLung, $23 from Etsy.

 Happy Indigenous Peoples Day!

Brian Beutler, a veteran of Talking Points Memo and The New Republic, now mainly active as a Substacker, is one of the best at doing this one thing I can't stand, which he was up to again over the weekend: getting himself so worked up over Democratic politicians' failure to thwart the far right in its evil plans that he ends up assigning them all the blame, in a kind of vicious Murc's Law feedback loop—since only Democrats have agency, they are the effective actors when the right succeeds: they must be the ones responsible for the way our country is turning rapidly into a police state, they literally made it happen, through their fecklessness and timidity and lack of leadership. While Miller and Vought are diligently constructing fascism, Beutler is so busy complaining about Schumer and Jeffries that he hardly has time to talk about that.

Which isn't to say he doesn't have a point about Schumer and Jeffries, or whoever he's mad at at a given moment. What I want to say, rather, is that it isn't a good approach to doing something about it; it's a counsel of despair, frankly, which precludes the reader from trying.

This was especially evident in this particular post, where he's responding, precisely, to readers asking "What can we do?"

...the answer is unsatisfying, because it’s the same one you’ll get everywhere: Do what JB Pritzker says. Protest peacefully, record abuses on your phone, share the videos widely. Join organized marches—if you’re a U.S. citizen, the incremental risk of protesting is minimal. You’re likelier to be hit by a falling object or trampled to death at a concert than you are to be targeted for carrying a sign, or being an Indivisible volunteer or anything else. If you’re able, and if it comes to it, engage in genuine civil disobedience, though there’s more danger there: a greater risk of arrest, assault, political harassment.

Showtime

 

This may be more obvious than I think, but this week's votes on a continuing resolution to keep the government going past Friday's debt ceiling deadline until September are a kind of confession of failure on the part of House Republicans, and Speaker Mike Johnson in particular, retreating from the effort to use reconciliation rules to put through the huge package of tax cuts and spending cuts they passed on February 25 for fiscal year 2025. Never mind, said Johnson: Elon and Donald can do it, or something like it.

But Johnson said those cuts would be reserved for legislation to fund the government in fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1.

"We will actually be able to change the way this is done and incorporate all the extraordinary savings that DOGE is uncovering through fraud, waste and abuse, the other revenues that President Trump is bringing about because of his policies," Johnson told the Fox News program "Sunday Morning Futures."

Although as you know DOGE hasn't uncovered any fraud, waste, or abuse at all that they're able to publicly identify, and their own estimate of how much money they've managed to save so far—$105 billion—would be pretty pathetic as an attack on a $2 trillion deficit, if it were accurate, which it clearly isn't anywhere near. While the revenue that President Trump is "bringing about because of his policies" means tariffs, and it's pretty hard to estimate, what with Trump changing his mind up to three or four times in a given day (just announced he's doubling the tariffs on steel and aluminum he's landing on Canada on Wednesday, from 25% to 50%), but the best guesses seem to make it around $120 billion a year, which also isn't much, though the rise in consumer prices it will bring on, focused on the areas of electronics and clothing, motor vehicles and food, will cost us around $1600-$2000 a year per household. Not only a tax on Americans, whatever Trump may imagine, but a very regressive tax, mostly felt by those with lower incomes (the lower your income, the higher the proportion of it that you end up spending on stuff like food and clothing, or really anything).

Shameless

 

State of the Union, February 2023. Photo by Getty Images.

So they managed to expel George Santos. For the handicappers, the special election to fill out his term will be held sometime in February, with the candidates chosen by party leaderships; the main contenders on the Democratic side will be furious centrist Tom Suozzi (seeking to recapture the seat he abandoned last year in a stupid furious-centrist run for the New York governorship, which is what got Santos elected in the first place) and Anna Kaplan, an Iranian-Jewish refugee who's served as a "social-liberal" state senator (after losing to Suozzi in the 2016 primary for the House seat). I imagine either Democrat has a pretty good chance of winning; the district has a lot of Republicans, but not so many doctrinaire ones, and they're really angry at the Republican party for the embarrassment of Santos.

The one point I really want to make about the expulsion itself, because I don't thing anybody else is making it, is addressed to Santos's (and Speaker Mike Johnson's) assertion that expelling a Congressman who has merely been charged, not convicted, with the seven counts he was indicted for last May and the 23 more in the superseding indictment in October, is an unprecedented and therefore bad and dangerous thing to do. That's not exactly correct.

Titting vs. Tatting

"Tit for tat" was the title of a Thomas the Tank Engine episode where Bert gets splashed by some visitors and their car, and decides to pay them back. You can watch it, but you really don't have to.

As the forces of justice close in around Trump, I've been noticing the concern trolls coming out with a warning, "Don't go too far," addressed to various people, like the Jack Goldsmith column Tom covered the other day ("The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences" no-paywall gift link):

The prosecution may well have terrible consequences beyond the [Justice] department for our politics and the rule of law. It will probably inspire ever more aggressive tit-for-tat investigations of presidential actions in office by future Congresses and by administrations of the opposing party, to the detriment of sound government.

Oh noes, not investigations of presidential actions by future Congresses! Anything but that! Spare us!

Or shall we say this has already started, at the beginning of this year, with Gym Jordan's tit for Jamie Raskin's tat, and it's not going anywhere? I submit that's not because it's not aggressive enough. Rather, it's because it has nothing going for it in the way of facts, as is shown in the gap between what Jordan and Comer claim on Fox News and what they've been able to show in their respective committees, which is basically nothing—it may have plunged to its nadir last week, when they claimed Hunter Biden's former partner Devon Archer would provide specific evidence of Joe Biden's corrupt participation in their dealings but publication of the transcript showed clearly that, though he certainly didn't have anything nice to say about Hunter, he'd firmly insisted Joe Biden was not involved. (What's the rule about not asking the witness any questions unless you know what the answers are going to be?)

Something is happening and I don't know what it is

So many signals and so much noise I don't even know who to quote on these developments. Maybe Uncle Dick—

I would hope—expect—they are moving to voting rights because there’s a plan to strike now. They’ve given themselves two weeks, which is a needless marker to fail by if there’s no plan. And yet.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) December 15, 2021

—but I'm getting the impression that the whole strategy in Congress and in the White House has turned upside down, with the BBB mess entirely postponed until the new year and some kind of voting rights bill replacing it as the administration's before-Christmas target, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Are there commitments from Manchin and Sinema to skip the filibuster on voting rights legislation? Manchin yesterday seemed to be saying no, nothing's changed as far as he's concerned:

“A rules change should be done to where we all have input . . . because we’re all going to live with it,” he told reporters Wednesday. “Because we’ll be in the minority sometime.”

And Sinema as well. Even though they both seemed perfectly cheerful about ignoring the filibuster rule to raise the debt ceiling, as Senator Warnock noted:

For the Record: FUD

Pessimism has a pretty good pedigree too...

Me trying to explain the facts of life to one of those self-denominated "progressives" ended up someplace that could be moderately interesting:

The slogan is popular. Since Medicare is not a single-payer program it's likely few people know whether "Medicare for All" is one, and it's certainly not known what they actually favor.

— Wiggles of Weimar (@Yastreblyansky) August 24, 2021

A lot of people don't know that. Here's a pretty good explainer https://t.co/x7WictdRrh

— Wiggles of Weimar (@Yastreblyansky) August 24, 2021

Mod Squad

 

Mods with modified scooters, Peckham, South London, May 1964, Daily Mirror via All That's Interesting.

This is making me crazy, on the subject of the push in the House, back early from August recess to deal with the double infrastructure package, the trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure proper, and the $3.5-trillion "human infrastructure" including the universal pre-K, universal two-year college, permanent child tax credit, expanded Medicare and Medicaid, and all the global warming initiatives that got cut out of the first one, to be passed by Democrats alone if necessary in the form of "instructions" to be carried out in the Senate.

As you've probably heard, the second part is threatened by a rump group of nine representatives who used to call themselves "Problem Solvers", led by New Jersey's Josh Gottheimer—now they're billed as "the Mod Squad"—insisting that they'd like to just vote on the first part for starters, in opposition to the 95 Rockers of the House Progressive Caucus, who have demanded starting with the second part, to forestall any cheating on the part of the Mods. Speaker Pelosi (who is solidly on the "progressive" side of the issue, contrary to some reports portraying her as in the middle) is said to have been working out a plan to do both of them more or less simultaneously.

So last night the nine issued a curious statement in the Washington Post—

For the Record: Debt Ceiling

The original debt ceiling crisis of 2011, as captured by cartoonist Jen Sorensen.

Did you all realize that the US debt ceiling actually doesn't exist, and hasn't existed for the past eight years? Though it will return, like a zombie, at the end of the month if Congress doesn't manage to stop it.

I did know, without realizing I did until our friend Dr. Volts asked:

I'm certain the answer is yes. It was created by Act of Congress in 1917, as a reasonable alternative to the previous practice of requiring Congress to approve bond issues one at a time. It doesn't exist at the moment at all--it's been "suspended" at two-year intervals since 2013

— Intimidating Smirk (@Yastreblyansky) July 22, 2021

Dance of the Squares

 

Square dance, Skyline Farms, Alabama. 1937. Ben Shahn, photographer. FSA/OWI, Library of Congress, via Johns Hopkins University Press.

Revealed in paragraph 11 of the New York Times version on this new Senate infrastructure proposal:

The five Republicans are Senators Rob Portman of Ohio, Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. The Democrats are key moderates: Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Mark Warner of Virginia, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Jon Tester of Montana.

I'd been kind of wondering why MSNBC, CNN, and NPR didn't seem to be mentioning any of their names except Romney's and Sinema's, and also just who they were. The inclusion of Casssidy is a bit of a clue: he's not known the way the others are as a "moderate", but he was the big surprise among the Republicans who who voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment, as did Romney, Murkowski, and Collins, while Portman (who's leaving the Senate because he can't get along with the Trumpers), said Trump's conduct on 6 January was "inexcusable" and represented a violation of his oath of office but claimed the impeachment itself was illegal. In other words, they represent the anti-Trump faction, which is kind of interesting, but probably can't put together the ten Republican votes that would be needed to pass the plan in regular order (they might get to eight with Toomey and Burr, who are also retiring, and conceivably Sasse, who isn't).

Which suggests the proposal, such as it is

Literary Corner: Noir

Photo by Mark Coggins/flickr.

Do not underestimate how many congressional Republicans would like to send checks to their people. Recently, I was on a call with the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus and a similar group of senators. I was struck by how passionately these Republicans and Democrats are committed to one another across party lines, how deftly they used the evenly divided Congress to restart the Covid-19 relief effort in December, how fervently they want to break the partisan logjam.

If this doesn’t work and Republicans go into full obstruction mode, Democrats should absolutely kill the filibuster. (David F. Brooks, "The Case For Biden Optimism", 21 January 2021)

The phone rang, a familiar number. I let it ring, long enough to take a shluk from the bottle of Waldweben Peach Schnapps and shove it back in the upper left desk drawer, then picked up. "Brooks here."

"Hello, David. How's married life?"

"Suits me. What can I do for you, outside of something I can't do for you?"

"You can do us a favor."

"Where have I heard that line before?"

"It's just a little thing."

I sighed, probably audibly, and tried to gather my wits. "I'm out of the game, pal. I don't do it any more. I just have to do one column a week, I have a gig at Aspen. I have a nice new wife, she doesn't like politics, she likes religion, go figure. I like religion too. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside."

Ag-Gravating

I ain't saying it ain't pretty. Via.

Those are the words. But the message, to farmers happy to demand price supports, is "if you vote for my opponent he'll give the money to people you don't like". It's a political principle, not an economic one, and can be overridden in a particular election. https://t.co/sNWVfsVHzN

— Yask4Mask (@Yastreblyansky) December 29, 2020

I wasn't even thinking about anything in particular when I posted this, but today on the radio the Covid version of this came up: as congresspeople continue to to debate over the best way of bribing their better-off constituents to put up with relief money going to the worse-off, it turns out that the nation's big-scale farmers have been collecting money they didn't need all along, with the bigger ones hogging the handouts:

Congress approved about $35 billion in emergency aid to farmers, which came on top of roughly $10 billion in traditional farm subsidies that were already in place. In addition, farmers were able to tap billions of dollars in funding from the Paycheck Protection Program.

Eviction Notice

 

Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, via Los Angeles Daily News.

What's with the CDC moratorium on evictions, which will allow renters to delay paying their landlords between now and 31 December, under certain conditions (they have to earn less than $99,000 for single income or $198,000 for couples, and they have to sign a statement saying they can't afford to pay and would be forced by eviction into homelessness or congregate housing)?

On the one hand it sounds like establishing a really important and somewhat radical disease control principle, that homelessness isn't just a social justice problem but also a public health problem—

“In the context of a pandemic, eviction moratoria — like quarantine, isolation, and social distancing — can be an effective public health measure utilized to prevent the spread of communicable disease,” the CDC’s unpublished order said.

—and on the other hand a really profoundly stupid way of doing it, since there's no rent forgiveness: the tenants, up to 40 million of them, will just be getting four months further in debt, and forced on 1 January to work out a plan to pay the money back or get evicted after all, leaving the landlord, and that includes 10 or 11 million mom and pop landlords renting an average of two properties apiece, possibly out for the four months, with unchanged utility and tax bills and mortgage payments, and uncompensated. Unlike in the previous moratorium proclaimed in the CARES Act, which offered (only for properties under federally-backed mortgages) support for unpaid rent from the local height of the pandemic in April through July.

Which is of course the problem: Congress is now unable to act, because Mitch McConnell won't do anything until Trump tells him to, and Trump's people don't like the Maxine Waters Emergency Housing Protections and Relief Act, allocating $100 billion to the problem and passed by the House in June.

A clue to what's going on is the way it was announced, not by the CDC or the White House (though it's an executive order), but by treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin (who just happens to have gotten filthy rich on thousands of evictions himself, as the former "foreclosure king" CEO of OneWest Bank), in a hearing with Waters's Financial Services Committee on Monday, where he was apparently reopening the negotiations that broke down early last month between the administration and the House on that second stimulus plan. What the CDC order does is to put on some pressure, I guess, toward getting it done (Mnuchin is a bad man, but a good negotiator, and he's increasingly looking to me like the last competent person in the cabinet), and a sign, perhaps, that he's serious. But the thing itself is not serious, and I'll bet it's not going anywhere except to the extent Congress gets engaged.

As to eviction and homelessness being a public health issue, that's long been a CDC position (like the view, hated by congressional Republicans, that gun violence is a public health issue), as in this put out in March 2017, when it was still a relatively independent agency:

On any given night, hundreds of thousands of people are homeless in the United States.1 These people might be chronically homeless, have temporarily lost their shelter, be fleeing domestic violence, or facing any number of other issues.2 Homelessness is closely connected to declines in physical and mental health; homeless persons experience high rates of health problems such as HIV infection, alcohol and drug abuse, mental illness, tuberculosis, and other conditions.3 Health problems among homeless persons result from various factors, such as barriers to care, lack of access to adequate food and protection, and limited resources and social services.4 As each of these factors have legal underpinnings, legal and policy interventions have often been used to attempt to address homelessness, although not always from a public health perspective.

But it's not a position that is likely to endear itself to Republicans, calling for interference in the free market and, you know, helping people with taxpayer money. Whichever bureaucrat in Atlanta managed to sneak it into Mnuchin's toolbox deserves congratulations.

For the Record: Secret Hearings

‘Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first - verdict afterwards.’

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The idea of having the sentence first!’

‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.

‘I won’t!’ said Alice.

‘Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved. (Via Gates of Vienna)

This was a weird exchange over more than a week that ended up unexpectedly plugging into the released transcript of the Yovanovitch interview:

IANAL but I don't think you can really do that after he's pleaded guilty and been convicted.

— Yas Time Goes By (@Yastreblyansky) October 26, 2019

Of course inside the Wingosphere nobody pleads guilty just because they're guilty. There must be some occult thing going on. Mike Flynn pleaded guilty to save his obnoxious son Mike Junior from a fate worse than having a dad in prison, though it's never clear what the Feds might have on the lad, other than his being a ratfucking Twitter scandalmongerer and working in Mike Senior's criminal business, involving performing services for the Turkish government that should not be performed and taking unreportable money. "Son, I've decided to take the rap for all the crimes I could have tried to blame on you."

For the Record: Devin's Farm

Apparently Devin Nunes, scourge of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and special secret emissary of the White House to the Hill, has gotten tired of all those people mocking him for claiming he's a Tulare County family farmer just because the family dairy farm moved to Iowa some years ago without him, where it's generally worked by undocumented immigrants, while he himself stayed in California growing fragrant and multiflowered paranoid fantasies about President Trump and the FBI, so he's bought himself a spread of acres in his district, well, maybe half an acre:

Nunes, R-Tulare, reported on a newly released financial disclosure form that he owns a Tulare County farm that generates no income for him and is worth less than $15,000.

Nunes has never before claimed a farm as one of his assets in annual financial disclosures, according to public records dating back to 2007.

That suggests he either bought a small part in a farm recently or he improperly filed previous financial disclosures, according to Delaney Marsco, legal counsel on ethics for the nonpartisan watchdog group Campaign Legal Center.

“Either he had a tiny stake in this farm all along and he’s been improperly filing financial disclosures, or he bought a tiny, tiny farm this year in order to protect his reputation as a farmer in his district,” Marsco said.

Except the reporters couldn't find any records that he or his wife had bought any land in 2018 either, so who knows? Anyway, I just couldn't really resist:

Infrastructure Week

"We'll always have Infrastructure Week!"

Politico suggested the principals were still hung over from the last Infrastructure Week at the end of April and the current one already was dead, hours before it officially got started (in the Cabinet Room, at 11:15):

WELL, THIS [the three-weeks-ago one] WENT ABOUT AS WELL as any other infrastructure week. The White House is not going to present any plan to pay for rebuilding the nation’s roads and highways.

INSTEAD, the administration will ask DEMOCRATS to make the case for a $2 trillion package. The White House has identified roughly $1 trillion in spending cuts to pay for legislation -- about as realistic a plan as saying this newsletter will fly you to the moon if you say abracadabra.

TO REALLY DRIVE THE NAIL IN THE COFFIN, Trump sent a letter to PELOSI and Senate Minority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER on Tuesday saying they should pass the USMCA before turning to infrastructure. The letter

Heh. Apparently in the end it was more explosive than that, per Peter Baker and Katie Rogers:

Literary Corner: Very, Very on Its Way

Image via Pixabay.

I Can't Say I'm Happy

by Donald J. Trump

I. I Can't Say I'm Happy

I can't say I'm thrilled,
but the wall is getting built regardless,
because we're doing other things
beyond what we're talking about here.

I have to study it.
I'm not happy about it.
It's not doing the trick,
but I'm adding things to it.

Am I happy at first glance?
I just got to see it.
The answer is no.
I'm not. I'm not happy.

Consider the Lilies of the Field Office

Can't come up with a great credit for this, but it's indoors in the New York Field Office,  via. 

I'm still trying to understand why the IG basically ignored evidence of anti-Clinton bias in the NYC FBI field office. Also leaks to Giuliani. If it's not true, that's important to know. But just ignored it.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 15, 2018

Not quite: there is a single mention, sort of, making it clear that the New York office was where they expected the leak of the Weiner laptop investigation to be leaked from, on p. 359 (h/t Tim Dickinson/Rolling Stone):

But no followup, and that's why Josh's frustration is justified. What made them confident the New York office would leak it?

Make Impeachment Normal

That's a remarkably open way of putting it: "I have a lawyer says it's unconstitutional what you're doing, but I'm a nice guy, I let you get away with it." With the implied corollary: "So why wouldn't you do the same for me? Fair is fair!" Nice!

It follows directly on Giuliani's remarks on the Sunday shows, to the effect that Trump's pardoning power is absolute and can't be questioned even if he pardons himself, and that he can't be indicted for anything, even murder, or even subpoenaed:

American Visigothic

A conservative mark = wrecked a lot of things and hurt a lot of people. @nytimes https://t.co/WwxZMzCenD

— Lance Mannion (@LanceMannion) December 26, 2017

After a chaotic start, the Roman Senate—sometimes working with Emperor Honorius holed up in Ravenna, sometimes against him—racked up a solid record of conservative accomplishment in 409, firmly letting their British colony know that it would have to defend itself from here on (Italia First!); improving troubled relations with Alaric the Visigoth by making him commander-in-chief of the Western Empire (magister utriusque militiae), paying him a substantial bribe, and naming an alternative local emperor, Priscus Attalus, more to Alaric's liking; not to mention passing an edict forbidding anybody to wear trousers within the city walls.

Actually the edict on the trousers dated back to 399, but you see what I mean.

Evariste-Vital Luminais (1821-96), Alaric's forces in the sack of Rome, 410.