From Philipp Plein's Billionaire clothing line, via Yahoo Sports.
Heather Cox Richardson puts together a couple of things I really should have put together myself: Bidenomics, seen as a definitive turn from Reagan-era neoliberalism, and the amazing character of the US economy at the moment, as reflected in the current numbers on growth, unemployment, and consumer spending:
with the election of Republican president Ronald Reagan, lawmakers claimed that concentrating wealth on the “supply side” of the economy would enable wealthy investors and businessmen to manage the economy more efficiently than was possible when the government meddled, and the resulting economic growth would make the entire country more prosperous.
The problem was that this system never produced the economic boom it promised. Instead, it moved money dramatically upward and hollowed out the American middle class while leaving poorer Americans significantly worse off.
6th-grade journalist Sarfaraz, of Jharkhand state, via TribuneIndia.
A goodhearted little story on NPR the other morning, reported by Pien Huang, about an elementary school in Tampa Bay with a substantial number of unhoused students, and a mindfulness program:
HUANG: Sullivan Elementary School is a public school. It partners with a local nonprofit called Metropolitan Ministries which supports poor and homeless families in Tampa Bay. Principal McMeen says many of the students come from the homeless shelter across the street, and they're dealing with serious stressors outside of school.
[PRINCIPAL] MCMEEN: Students experience these traumas of which sometimes they don't have control over. While we have them, what do we have control over? It's those few moments to say, OK, take that hurt, take that pain, let's figure out how we can release it.
HUANG: Research shows that chronic stress can shrink the brain, especially the parts that play a role in learning and memory, and that mindfulness helps reduce that stress. It's now 8:50 in the morning. Principal McMeen takes us to the second and third-grade classroom, where a mindfulness session plays over the loudspeaker.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Breathing in and out. Placing the hands on my heart. Repeating to yourself, I have the power to make wise choices.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: I have the power to make wise choices.
HUANG: The transformation is amazing. Seventeen rambunctious kids are now settled at their desks. Their eyes are closed, and today's session is about forgiveness.
I was enchanted with it until an unwelcome thought showed up: that there are people who would want to destroy it, for one reason or another, maybe for the same reason they've objected to school yoga, because mindfulness is the property of a religion that's not "Judeo-Christian" and it might endanger the children's souls; it might be some kind of Satanic plot.
Black-figure amphora ca. 510 B.C.E., now in the British Museum: Sisyphus pushes his boulder up a slope using his arms and a knee while Hades, Persephone, and Hermes look on. Via.
After I posted a
piece
yesterday on the David Brooks column on administrative burdens, Mr.
Administrative Burden himself, Don Moynihan, published a
commentary on his Substack—on Brooks, not on me, fortunately, and a different kind of piece, but
certainly more important than the thing I wrote. And somewhat fairer to
Brooks, perhaps, and making the point that I originally got from him and his
colleagues in a different tone. Also, on the subject of how Brooks sees DEI as
a "dangerous ideology":
Let's just pause for a moment to reflect upon how quickly and
easily the far right has succeeded in persuading moderate voices that offices who dedicated to the
values of diversity, equity, and inclusion are promoting a “dangerous
ideology.” It is seemingly so self-evident that no evidence is
needed.
Brooks also bemoans administrators and managers “doing things like designing
anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting
data and managing “systems.”” Let's assume that Brooks and many others value
harassment trainings at zero. The evidence on the efficacy of such trainings
is, at best, mixed. But those other tasks seem important. Having a clear
mission, having data that tells you how well you are doing, and functional
“systems” (let's say an IT system) matter a lot to organizational
success!
I also really wish I had gotten into one big thing involving the presidential
campaign: the question of whether Trump, the traditional Republican hater of
red tape and bureaucracy and overregulation, will do anything to reduce
administrative burden in a second term, should voters give him one:
if [Trump voters] are angry about bureaucracy, will they be served by
Trumpian solutions? Probably not. Such solutions include not
just massive politicization that will reduce the quality of public services. Based on Trump’s
record, we know that he will directly impose more bureaucracy, by, for
example:
massive politicization will lead to a terrified bureaucracy, unable to make the smallest
decisions without the say-so of political appointees. It is a recipe for
burdens.
Deconstructing parts of the government whose job it is to stop citizens from
being scammed: this included changing the mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or refusing to offer citizens the help they were legally entitled to having been ripped off by private higher
education institutions.
Introducing administrative burdens in the social safety net - Trump signed an
executive order calling for adding work requirements to any social program. When this was applied to Medicaid, the
results were disastrous, leading to eligible people losing benefits because of the red tape involved
in documenting work, and generating no labor market benefits.
Reducing capacity in government to benefit industry or those who don’t want
to pay taxes - for example, Trump and other Republicans have opposed badly
needed investments in IRS capacity that have improved customer service and
allowed the IRS to pilot a free tax filing system. Trump wants you to pay
Turbotax, and spend more time fruitlessly trying to get an IRS employee on the
phone.
In a recent essay in Liberties Journal, [University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson] illustrates how administrators control campus life by citing the rules they have devised to govern how members of the campus community should practice sadomasochistic sex: “When parties consent to BDSM 3, or other forms of kink, nonconsent may be shown by the use of a safe word, whereas actions and words that may signal nonconsent in non-kink situations, such as force or violence, may be deemed signals of consent.” Do institutions really need to govern private life this minutely?
Uh, yes. There are surely lots of overregulated campus activities, but you really do need to be careful about this one. Before somebody, as they say, gets hurt, I mean when they didn't actually want to.
Anyhow, Professor Edmundson's main complaint in the Liberties article seems to be that he is now expected to do some extra work when he's reporting on his year's academic activities:
From Trump's petitioner brief to the Supreme Court re Trump's Colorado disqualification; I think it's pretty much the same as what the Minnesota Supreme Court decided in their version of the case, and it's what I've been saying since August—Section 3 doesn't say insurrectionists should be kicked off the ballot, it says they can't hold the office.
That's what the text plainly says, and it's how the provision has historically been applied, most notably the only time it was applied between Reconstruction and Trump, in the Red Scare expulsion of Victor L. Berger (Socialist-WI), who was convicted of espionage in 1919 over his opposition to World War I, subject of numerous editorials in his newspaper, the Milwaukee Leader, and given a 20-year sentence:
If Ron DeSantis surprises in Iowa and beyond, if he recovers from his long polling swoon and wins the Republican nomination, it will represent the triumph of a simple, intuitive, but possibly mistaken idea: That voters should be taken at their word about what they actually want from their leaders.
Based on his own inquiries into what Republican voters wanted, which had led him to believe that a plurality of the party, maybe 40%, would really like to vote for somebody like Ron DeSantis, Trumpish in his style of appointing judges and managing the economy, and opposing "progressive cultural hegemony" fiercely but perhaps in a less annoying manner; though I don't know where he got his opinion that Trump had been managing the economy, as opposed to the TV personalities like Larry Kudlow and out-and-out cranks like Peter Navarro who stumbled into his path; and Douthat's research methods on public opinion may have left something to be desired:
I talked to a lot of these kind of Republicans between 2016 and 2020 — not a perfectly representative sample, probably weighted too heavily toward Uber drivers and Catholic lawyer dads, but still enough to recognize a set of familiar refrains. These voters liked Trump’s policies more than his personality. They didn’t like some of his tweets and insults, so they mostly just tuned them out. They thought that he had the measure of liberals in a way that prior Republicans had not, that his take-no-prisoners style was suited to the scale of liberal media bias and progressive cultural hegemony.
I assume the Catholic lawyers were Connecticut neighbors he met in church and school functions, assuming his kids and theirs were in the same parochial schools, and he didn't talk to the moms. No, that's not a representative sample, Ross.
The "God Made Trump" video from January 2024, on the eve of the Iowa caucus. After "God Made a Farmer", the celebrated routine by radio commentator Paul Harvey (1918–2009), first presented at the 1978 Future Farmers of America convention. Here's my version:
And on the 8th Day, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said, "Paradise needs a parasite."
So God made a Former.
God said, "I need somebody ready to rise before dawn to watch Fox & Friends, grab a cheeseburger and post some tweets, wander into the Oval Office around 11:00 for more TV, call in some of his yes-men to tell him how great he is, post some more tweets, watch some more TV, post some more tweets, and still be ready after midnight to waddle down to the bar in the hotel he owns to enjoy the sound of the bribe money tinkling into the cash register."
So God made a Former.
"I need somebody strong enough to play 36 holes of golf every weekend day yet tender enough to put on his own makeup and style his unique hair;* somebody who screams at his subordinates and then threatens the press, and gets back to the East Wing hungry enough for two cheeseburgers and a fishwich before he settles down to compose a few more tweets and maybe a little leering or snatch-and-grab with the ladies in what Alyssa Farah Griffin described as 'countless pieces of what [she] considered impropriety in the White House that [she] brought to the chief of staff because [she] thought the way he engaged with women was dangerous,' and afterwards maybe ask for one of them to be brought back so he can look at her ass again."
So God made a Former.
God said, "I need somebody who won't get all shook up by the deaths of soldiers (losers and suckers who 'knew what they were signing up for'), victims of mass shootings ('It's just horrible, so surprising to see it here, but we have to get over it'), and the casualties of a pandemic virus (most of them came from Blue states anyway, his son-in-law told him). I need somebody who can make standup shtik out of tragedy, federal crimes out of somebody's stolen dick pics, and innocence out of his own fraud indictment; somebody who can invent upwards of 7,000 lies a year, and not even get tired; somebody who can't be bothered to hide his own attachment to dictators and white supremacists but cheerfully calls others 'fascists' when they call him out for it."
So God made a Former.
God said, "Give me a man who would go any length, spend any money, use any weapon, for retribution against those who dared to criticize him or speak out against his criminal behavior, but defend a flatterer to the end ('When Putin goes out and tells everybody -- and you talk about a relationship, but he says Donald Trump is going to win and Donald Trump is a genius, and then I have people saying you should disavow. I said, I'm going to disavow that?')."
So God made a Former.
It had to be somebody who'd neglect no opportunity to funnel taxpayer money into his failing businesses, no matter how small the gain; somebody who'd spend night and day begging for money for his alleged political purposes and then spend it all on his lawyers instead; somebody who'd kill to stay in the White House and then could never think of anything to do when he was there, other than watch more TV and post more tweets; somebody who'd give endless time to meeting with pastors and rabbis and clergymen of all kinds but was visibly uncomfortable and unfamiliar with how to behave in a religious institution and avoided them as much as he could; somebody who held his family together with bonds of greed and fear of losing out on the inheritance; somebody who would sigh and smile when his son said he wanted to spend his life "doing what Dad does," and reply, "Not as long as I'm alive, you won't! GTFOOH!"
So God made a Former.
*The authorized parody in the "Truth" video suggests that Trump's gentle arms are those of a trained obstetrician, and that he has delivered at least one of his own grandchildren, I just want to emphasize that.
Israeli journalist Noga Tarnopolsky said something that especially struck me
on BBC, on the attitudes among the families of the hostages still held in
Gaza, in reference to Antony Blinken's latest visit: that they
trust President Joe Biden, because they're confident he's doing
everything he can to bring the hostages back, and that they don't feel that
way about their own prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
I'm glad to hear somebody does. I'm not myself ready to give up on Biden in
this context, but it's really not easy and not getting easier. What I've
supposed
could be his plan, to get a Palestinian state out of this horror, still looks
delusional to seasoned observers, who understand that there's less appetite in
Israel for such a thing than ever, especially inside the government, now
completely dominated by parties that have been absolutely opposed to it since
their deadly enemies of the Israeli "center-left" signed the Oslo accords
(though I wonder if the inclusion of center-left ministers in the war cabinet
makes a difference to that), but also in a general population that gets its information from extraordinarily biased TV coverage; and my own idea of how it might work could be
ridiculously baroque.
Starting with the observation that there is no direct action Biden can take that will save a single life in Gaza, because of the situation inside the US as well. Biden cannot threaten to cut off military aid to Israel because Congress is not going to allow it. Lobbying groups like AIPAC make sure it doesn't happen. American Jews, overwhelmingly liberals and Democrats, may not like it, but we can't do much about it; it's not our money that makes the difference. And putting qualifications on support for Israel is a new and untested position for Democrats; for traditional Democrats in Congress, likely the party majority, it's hard to imagine questioning Israel on anything.
And, most important. Netanyahu really doesn't care: he's the first Israeli prime minister to take open sides in a US election (for his old Boston private equity colleague Mitt Romney in 2012, and for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020), because he's confident it will never threaten American support for any government he puts together. Whatever Biden does has to deal with this lack of the leverage Americans had on earlier Israeli governments.
There's something else worth talking about, that Subotic sort of points at
here but doesn't come out and say: that while we weren't looking the job of
identifying plagiarism has been turned over to an AI device that matches the
words in the text with all the previously published words it knows about—it's
been automated, meaning it finds a lot more stuff than anybody ever found
before, much more than your professors could find when they had to rely on
Google to search it out for them, and almost infinitely more than in the
millennia before Google existed (the term was
invented by the Latin epigrammatist Martial, annoyed with a fellow Roman who was in the habit of reciting his,
Martial's, poems in public with the claim that he'd written them
himself—Martial liked to think of his published poems as slaves that he had
set free, and called the impostor a plagiarius, a slave-kidnapper).
Robots shouldn't be tagging plagiarism for the same reason they shouldn't be
tagging pornography, really; because unlike Justice Stewart, they don't and
can't "know it when I see it." They don't know anything. They can be
furnished with an algorithm that labels pictures as "porn" and "not-porn" by
the criteria the algorithm supplies, and that's it, and you already know how
well that works:
As
Tom Scocca
was not the only one to point out, there was an
actual Rubicon-crossing episode when Trump sent his irregular army
of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
When Julius Caesar took a single legion, the 13th, across the river Rubicon,
crossing the border just north of Rimini between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy
proper, in 49 B.C.E. (a capital offense in Roman law, by the way—nobody but an
elected official, consul or praetor, was allowed to command troops, i.e. to
serve as an imperator, in Roman territory, and Caesar was neither;
among the first things he did when he got to Rome was to have himself named
dictator for the next six months by the Senate, and set himself up
to be elected consul by the People as well), he launched the five-year civil
war that ended with his unprecedented naming as dictator for life, and
his assassination a few weeks later. It also ended, of course, with the end of
the Roman Republic, which was to be transformed into an Imperium, a
military autocracy, by his nephew Octavian over the coming years.
It's time for the annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup of the year's best blogposts as chosen by the bloggers and curated by Batocchio at his blog Vagabond Scholar. Don't miss it!
NSDAP meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller, Munich, 1923. Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann, via Wikimedia Commons.
In October 1923, as everybody knows, a conspiracy of members of the National Socialist German Workers Party, its SA paramilitary force, and some rightwing army officers marched on the Munich headquarters of the German VII Military District (covering the state of Bavaria), with the plan of taking over the city militarily and using it as the base for a march on the national capital of Berlin, in emulation of Benito Mussolini's March on Rome of exactly a year earlier, in the hope of replacing Germany's five-year-old attempt at democracy with a Mussolini-style autocracy. The ensuing battle with the police and a group of loyalist soldiers did not work out very well for the Nazis, who lost 15 dead, but not so badly for their leader, 34-year-old Adolf Hitler, who earned a five-year sentence of Festunghaft, a particularly mild form of imprisonment, later reduced for good behavior to eight months (the same as the time Dinesh D'Souza did!), all the time he, Emil Maurice, and Karl Hess needed to draft Mein Kampf, published in 1925-26.
One other upshot of the incident for Hitler was his determination that next time, if there was a next time, he'd do it entirely by the book, as he told a courtroom in 1930: "The National Socialist
Movement will seek to attain its aim in this state by constitutional means. The constitution shows us only the methods, not the goal. In this
constitutional way, we will try to gain decisive majorities in the legislative bodies in order, in the moment this is successful, to pour the state
into the mould that matches our ideas." (Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1998) "Now we are strictly legal!" exclaimed Goebbels.
I used to think it was funny how Trump followed this procedure backwards, starting his political career by getting elected to the presidency more or less legitimately, and ending it with an illegal adventure even more ill-planned, shambolic, and doomed than the Beer Hall Putsch.
I'm still kind of dubious about the magical qualities of the 14th Amendment Section 3, as I was back in September, but I should add that I'm a lot more impressed than I was expecting to be by the case Colorado's Supreme Court makes for reversing the original district court ruling, which had concluded that Donald Trump did indeed "engage in" an "insurrection" against the United States, but 14/3 didn't apply to him, because as president he was not an "officer under the United States", as the Amendment specifies:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
The president isn't an officer? Even though he holds the Office of the presidency and swears to execute the Office faithfully when he is inaugurated and can be removed from Office if he's impeached and convicted? Not to get all originalist on you, but that's what "officer" meant in the 18th century, what we more often call an official, somebody who holds an office in an organization, and of course the president of the United States is one. Imagine a law that removes all the other officers, in Congress or the judiciary or the civil service, it they've taken part in a rebellion against the government, but doesn't disqualify the big cheese? That won't let Lieutenant Henry Numbnuts of the former Confederate Army serve as a section head in a customs office, but it's OK for Jefferson Davis to be president? No.
And so the Colorado Supreme Court reversed that, unsurprisingly, but there was no reason to mess with the main part of the decision, which was very solid, and it's intact in the new ruling. Unless you were working on such a tight deadline that you didn't have time to read it, as apparently happened to Jonathan Chait:
Habima Square, Tel Aviv, November 11. Photo by Miriam Alster/Flash90 via
Times of Israel.
Maybe this latest outrage, the IDF killing of three escaping Israeli
hostages—they'd improvised a white flag and had their shirts off, I figure in
the hope that would show they weren't suicide terrorists rushing the troops,
and yet the troops fired—will really start making the Israeli public rethink
what's being done in their names. "Israel has a right to defend itself," as
the Hasbara always reminds us, but is that what it's doing?
Then there's the other body count, of hostages killed with their captors under
the collapsed buildings in the bombing raids, for which the latest number
released by Hamas is
57
(of whom IDF has acknowledged
18, without, I think, releasing the names, if they have them). Israel is
killing Hamas's prisoners!
And it's not obliterating Hamas, though some of those killed doubtless
belonged to the organization—maybe as many as 40%, though that's only
estimated by
assuming that
every male between the ages of 18 and 59 in the territory is a combatant, even
though only a third of adults in Gaza expressed any support for Hamas in the
October 6 survey.
New polling
shows a hugely changed picture, though:
I'm feeling a nagging dissatisfaction with the conduct of the New York lawsuit
against Trump, his older sons, and the family business over the flagrant
fraudulence of their financial "disclosures", which report wildly exaggerated
values for their assets as a way of getting banks and insurance companies to
get them better rates than they could otherwise get.
It's not anything wrong with the case, or any likelihood that New York will
lose the case, I'm feeling very cheerful about that, but the way Trump and his
attorneys seem to be playing the publicity war:
In defiant and rambling testimony on [November 7], Trump acknowledged that his asset valuations were
sometimes inaccurate but said they were not relevant to banks and insurers.
Trump's lawyer Christopher Kise built on that argument on Thursday, saying
banks that did business with the Trump Organization profited from the loans.
"There's no victim. There's no complainant. There's no injury. All of that
is established now,” Kise said. (Reuters)
And all the New York lawyers can say is response is that they don't have to
prove there was a victim. Or the statutes were the victims ("I would just
basically point out," Judge Engoron said, "that the mere fact that the lenders
were happy doesn't mean that the statute wasn't violated. It doesn't mean
other statutes weren't violated.") "Help, I'm being violated!" cried § 175.10.
Which is no doubt true from the legal standpoint, but it's just an awful look.
No harm, no foul, right? If the banks are happy with it, where's the harm?
Can't we please come up with a better argument than that?
On a hunch, I asked Dr. Google to find out for me if National Review had published a memorial tribute to the late Norman Lear. No, apparently, the closest they came was this, by their then TV critic Kyle Smith (he moved on to Wall Street Journal last year), from 2019, when the great producer was a still-lively 97, reviewing an ABC experimental restaging of a couple of old episodes, one from All in the Family and one from The Jeffersons:
Edith is a simpleton, Archie is a bigot, and Mike and Gloria are mouthpieces for grindingly dull liberals like the show’s creator, Norman Lear. Occasionally the show would allow Archie to score a point, which was the only time things were a bit surprising, hence a bit funny. Far from being “brave,” All in the Family was mostly content to tread water, returning to the same tropes week after week.
Interestingly, Smith liked, or claimed to like, The Jeffersons better, but not mentioning Lear had a role in that one too:
That thing about "Speaker" Mike Johnson proposing to release more video from
the January 6 insurrection, but only with some of the faces of the rioters
blurred out "because we don't want them to be retaliated against and we don't
want them to be charged by the DOJ," is that that completely obviates the
purpose Republicans claimed to have for releasing them, which was supposed to
be for "transparency".
Actually, let's just come out and say it, the official reason for demanding
the public release of the videos was the purported evidence they would
probably have of who the "real" villains of January 6 were—not the 688 simple
folks who have been convicted of crimes committed in the affair, 587 of them
pleading guilty, but the masterminds of "antifa" and/or the FBI who secretly
organized the thing. Which, of course, never happened, so there wouldn't be
any evidence on the videos that it did. The object of Gaetz and Biggs and
Gohmert and Greene and all those Republicans demanding the release of the
videos was not, in fact, to get them released (against the advice of Capitol
security, which feared making them generally available would reveal too much
about the arrangements in the building, such as the locations of security
cameras), but to nourish the paranoid belief that the 688 criminal convicts
(or however many there are now) had been entrapped by the Deep
State/Communist/Fascist conspiracy, by making it look as if the Capitol
authorities were holding stuff back.
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