Literary Corner: Potato-in-Chief

Convinced Putin gave Trump this present just to force him to be photographed grasping an object with both hands, which always makes him look like somebody who has trouble using two hands at a time. Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images via NPR.

The brethren are pretty flummoxed by the Retired Emperor coming out to tell everybody, in an interview with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton (surely that's a bluegrass duo) about how "smart" and "savvy" it is of President Putin to go through with this invasion of territory he already controls and what a "genius" he is, making him sound like the bought-and-paid-for Russian asset we've been telling you he is for the past six years.

Of course that's unpossible! There must be some other explanation, of which my current favorite is the view that Trump's peculiar enthusiasms are irrelevant, since they had no effect on his foreign policy, which he had nothing to do with:

This view of Trump's "toughness" with Russia is identical to the one Trump's clowns kept putting out for four years. The focus of the White House was in fact to find every possible way of avoiding Congressionally mandated sanctions https://t.co/oEHXLlza0n https://t.co/oEHXLlza0n

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) February 23, 2022

Campaign For Nonvoters

 

GDP growth January 2019 to January 2022

Commenter Cheez wrote in re Saturday's post:

That "majority" must be based on the third of eligible voters who so far can't be bothered. Is there any evidence that these groundhogs can be relied on to choose uncomfortable reality over a snug and cosy fantasy? I wonder how much is known about these people, what they care about, what sort of threat would finally make them pay attention to their civic duty, as voting (and serving on a jury) used to be referred to as.

And a majority can be ignored if they do not contest being ignored. It's going to take an existential threat to get people's attention. For the Democratic Party, it should be the outright theft of a presidential election: 2000 didn't do it but Republicans had a veneer of sanity then. It's going to take some unholy blend of Gilead and Idiocracy to get apathetic non-voters to ask "wha happened?" .

My response:

choose uncomfortable reality over a snug and cosy fantasy?

I don't think you can build a bigger majority than we had in 2018 on fear of dictatorship, if that's what you mean. We did do pretty well out of sheer negative partisanship in 2020--more people thinking Republicans are bad than thinking Democrats are bad--but that was a presidential year, with Trump personally embodying the bad. The majority I have in mind is the one that favors minimum wage hikes, family leave and subsidized day care, electric cars, and taxing the rich.

Democrats in Disarray

 

Seven factions? That's what I call disarray!

Meanwhile Mike Allen for Axios is gunning for "the Squad":

The hard-left politics of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and the so-called "Squad," once a dominant theme for vast numbers of elected Democrats, is backfiring big-time on the party in power, top Democrats tell us.

Why it matters: The push to defund the police, rename schools and tear down statues has created a significant obstacle to Democrats keeping control of the House, the Senate and the party’s overall image.

"It's what we've been screaming about for a year," said Matt Bennett, c0-founder of center-left Third Way, which launched Shield PAC to defend moderate Democrats.

Siri, how many is a "vast number"? Also, what does "center-left" mean in an organization that rejects leftness in its very name? The total "top Democrats" cited in the article are two, Matt Bennett here and the famously bipartisan Problem Solver Josh Gottheimer, how "top" is that? No actual issue in which Democrats were defeated is mentioned—issues mentioned in the article are in San Francisco and Minneapolis, where Republicans really have no pull at all, and the issue in San Francisco wasn't one of those "woke" ones anyway.

For the Record: I Say It's Spinach

 

Drawing by Kaamran Hafeez, originally in The New Yorker but I don't have a date, via Fine Art America.

AP finally found a couple of Democrats in a diner, and the results aren't pretty:

Some Democrats in rural Pennsylvania are afraid to tell you they’re Democrats.

The party’s brand is so toxic in the small towns 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that some liberals have removed bumper stickers and yard signs and refuse to acknowledge publicly their party affiliation. These Democrats are used to being outnumbered by the local Republican majority, but as their numbers continue to dwindle, those who remain are feeling increasingly isolated and unwelcome in their own communities.

“The hatred for Democrats is just unbelievable,” said Tim Holohan, an accountant based in rural McKean County who recently encouraged his daughter to get rid of a pro-Joe Biden bumper sticker. “I feel like we’re on the run.”

The article's basic thrust, not about how Republicans have been driven insane by the vicious lies of Rupert Murdoch's media and the sermons of Southern Baptists, but rather how Democrats "have a problem" ("symptomatic of a larger political problem threatening the Democratic Party heading into the November elections"), outraged our friend @drvolts, late of Wonkette, in a terrific polemical thread, like

The "Dems" that people in these areas hate bear virtually no resemblance to real-life Dems. It doesn't matter what Fetterman or any other ostentatiously in-touch-with-working-people candidate says -- they'll never hear it! They'll just hear lies about him. That's the root of it.

— David Roberts (@drvolts) February 17, 2022

[snip]

Old News vs. Wrong News—Why Not Both?

There's a Marx Brothers movie—maybe Horse Feathers?—with a mook who has this face of invincible rectitude. What a shyster.

Margot Cleveland at The Federalist indicts

5 Media Lies About The Latest Special Counsel Revelations

Lie no. 1 is the claim that "it's just those crazed right-wingers" who think the Durham investigation uncovered evidence that somebody was being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign before the campaign existed to "spy" on Trump Tower and the pinging with the Alfa Bank server thing.

Indeed, several writers are cited as calling this a rightwing "furor", from Charlie Savage at the New York Times through Brian Stelter at CNN to Hillary Clinton herself:

Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it's a day that ends in Y.

The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.

For those interested in reality, here's a good debunking of their latest nonsense.https://t.co/iYY8Uxuogx

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 16, 2022

And what makes it a lie? Cleveland doesn't cite any of the alleged liars:

Joe Did What? The Second Time Around

 

Imagery of a war scare.

Yesterday on NPR, when I was half asleep during an interview with the career diplomat John Herbst, who was ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006 and now runs the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, I heard a reference to something like "the last time Russian troops surrounded Ukraine and an invasion seemed imminent, in April 2021,"  and I was kind of wait, what?

Because that's less than a year ago, and I don't remember anything about it, and almost nobody else does either, as far as I can tell, and I really don't think it was widely reported in the US. When I finally got around to looking it up, Dr. Google sent me, not to The New York Times or Washington Post, but the Natsional'nyy Instytut Strategichnykh Doslidzhen' (National Institute of Strategic Studies, and I'm not sure I'm transliterating it right) in Kiyiv, which has an excellent report on "The Russian and Ukrainian Spring 2021 War Scare", in English, that tells me more or less what I needed to know: In March 2021 Ukrainian intelligence were alarmed by an unusual concentration of Russian troops and hardware forming along the Russian-Ukrainian border, and at the end of the month the US European Command raised its alertness leve from "possible crisis" to "potential imminent crisis". 

You Come Here, You Drink Trump

"Forty-Five" cocktail (Wyoming whiskey, Demerara, orange bitters, Diet Coke, garnished with "two American beef sliders"), $45, at 45 Wine and Whiskey, burgers not shown.

Shane Goldmacher and Eric Lipton at The New York Times seemingly giddy with pleasure at how enthusiastically The Former Guy is taking care of business:

For Mr. Trump, the monetization of his post-presidency represents a return to his roots. He expertly leveraged his celebrity as the host of “The Apprentice” and his image as a decisive businessman to build credibility when he first entered politics. Now, he is executing the same playbook, only in reverse: converting a political following that provided hundreds of millions of dollars in small campaign contributions into a base of consumers for all things branded Trump.

Right. Years ago he turned his imaginary skills as the manager of a long string of real estate and tchotchke-selling businesses, based not on success (all the businesses actually failed) but rather his performance as that character on a TV drama, into a successful campaign for the presidency of the United States. Now he's turning his imaginary skills as president (in fact he is by common consent of historians, political scientists, and most normal people the worst president we've ever had) into actual success selling tchotchkes and profiting from real estate.

War News

 

Pine forest near Klavdievo, Borodianka Raion, Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine. Photo by Aymayna Khikari via Wikimedia Commons.

Practically the same thing, in other words. US should have learned from Russia not to invade Afghanistan, no doubt. Russia should learn from US failures in Vietnam and Iraq not to invade Ukraine. It won't end well for them.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 12, 2022

Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Form No More

A Twitter friend sent me the following by DM yesterday evening, and I didn't notice it until later:

Does @maggieNYT’s latest change your opinion any?

My opinion of what? I assume she must have posted another obnoxious, defensive tweet, and it's so bad I'll really stop coming to her defense myself, like she's my girlfriend and the scales will fall from my eyes and I'll ask for my ring back.

Look, she's not my girlfriend. I've never met her and it's unlikely I ever will. If I saw her at the smoked fish counter at Barney Greengrass I would pretend, as I always do with celebrities, that I didn't recognize her. I don't want to know her. More important, I really need for people to start distinguishing between the profoundly stupid question, "Is X a Good Person or a Bad Person?" and the important question, "Is a thing that X is doing having a good or useful or pleasing impact or a bad or unhelpful or ugly impact? and what do we need to do about it?

For the Record: We Had All the Information We Needed

 

So Maggie Haberman's aptly titled biography of The Former Guy is about to drop, and they're teasing it, as is the custom, with a sample scabrous anecdote—how Trump clogged White House toilets with the bits of torn-up official documents, as if the cops were knocking and he was getting rid of his stash of coke. So what's got everybody riled up? This new evidence of Trump's knowing, continuous violation of the Presidential Records Act? Hell no, everybody's mad at Maggie for presumably waiting till now to publish the story so she could cash in on it.

Everybody, that is, except some old bloggers:

Maybe there would have been hearings - maybe even an impeachment. But he would have skated, with unanimous or near-unanimous Republican support. So withholding the story had no effective impact.

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) February 10, 2022

Now we know why he was so obsessed with water-saving toilets. It wasn't about flushing shit, it was about flushing criminal evidence pic.twitter.com/dt33u7kroU

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 10, 2022

Republicans and Drugs

 

As Liddle Marco gets Trumpier and Trumpier, I get angrier and angrier:

Why do you assume only racial minority communities use smoking methods to take drugs?

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2022

I guess it should be clear that he does not in fact assume anything of the sort—he knows perfectly well that methamphetamine users are typically white (in proportions ranging from 54 percent in San Jose to 94 percent in Portland), with Latin users constituting a majority in Los Angeles and a substantial second place elsewhere, and crystal meth smokers, with the characteristic "meth mouth", are very much among those who can transmit diseases like hepatitis by sharing pipes and would benefit, along with the general public health, from a program distributing clean pipes. 

You're Kidding Me

 Southern Border Parole Policy 

Whoa! You're kidding me, right?

Two wrongs don't make a right

Yes, it's Redhand, and this is one of my unhappily rare posts here.  The spirit is willing, but my septuagenarian career as an immigration lawyer keeps me far, far busier than I'd like.  ("All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.")  However, this development is so interesting that its takes precedence over my long-ago-promised post about dysfunction in the immigration court system. (An evolving work-in-progress.)

A large percentage of my work is devoted to asylum claims, and it's probably what I'm best known for.  Prior to the Trump Administration's attempted (and largely successful) dismantling of the system for processing asylum claims near our borders, there were reasonably well-understood procedures for processing individuals appearing at U.S. ports of entry (POE) ("arriving aliens") or points of illegal border entry (present in the United States without authorization after entry at a place other than a POE).  Note, these latter folks  are popularly known in the trade as "EWIs" (those who "Entered Without Inspection.")

For the Record: What Is Capitalism

Class Strugle--The board game. Via Wikipedia.

Covering some ground I'm afraid we may have covered before—

employees while the CEO keeps getting richer and takes rides into outer space in a flying penis rocket. But it also applies to Linda making a decent living by selling homemade cupcakes at the flea market. If she's selling something she produced and pricing it at...

— Ghost of Gene Rayburn of House Moderna🍸 (@ghostofgener) February 8, 2022

That is literally not capitalism. Linda is not an alienated wage slave selling her labor for the benefit of an owner sucking the surplus value out of it. She's an independent artisan who controls her own means of production, in a pattern from long before capitalism was invented.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2022

A Game of Thrones

 

Via ESPN, October 2011. 

People saying The Former Guy incriminated himself last week with his remarkable statement wishing Pence had "overturned the Election" 

"If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had 'absolutely no right' to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election? Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!"

are misreading the way he and his ghostwriter are thinking: the "overturning" he's talking about would not be a crime at all, but simple justice, to his mind, because he's better attuned to sports than democracy. 

For the Record: Gunga Dinesh Holds Forth on the Demonstrations in Ottawa

 

Video screenshot via CTV News.

Oh, you're a Marxist now are you? That wasn't on my bingo card! Welcome to the Left, but there are a few things you need to get straight before you start speaking on our behalf.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

"Workers" revolting against vaccine mandates aren't doing anything to help workers. Low-income inviduals end up in hospital and dying of COVID-19 at horrifyingly higher rates than upper-income. https://t.co/8KJUIfz3Cc pic.twitter.com/6zoqrlemQG

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

But rich amateur pissants like yourself and Tucker Carlson get a big share of responsibility for all this suffering and death, as you work to churn up vaccine hesitancy and refusal because you think it will gain votes for your political party.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

So if you want to join a mighty workers' revolt, just remember that the class enemy isn't Justin Trudeau, it's you.

/fin

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

Lumpenproletarier living in a false consciousness promoted by the pet intellectuals of the bourgeoisie is something Marx waa pretty familiar with, though I don't know if he would have identified it with white nationalism (arising among white trash told they could at least be proud of not being Black in the Old South) as easily as we can today.

For the Record: Legitimate Political Discourse

 

Cool variant on Lévi-Strauss's famous analysis in which the stories of the Theban cycle are shown as simultaneously present in the myth, like the voices in a musical score. Via John Phillips, National University of Singapore.

Structuralism continues to be bon à penser!

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

That's after Claude Lévi-Strauss, the totem hero of structural anthropology, who said that mythology is "bon à penser", "good to think", in the same way as we say certain foods are "good to eat". In the same way, structural anthropology itself can be "good to think"  I've been working on an example that's interesting, I think, with reference to gloomy comparisons between the 1923 Nazi coup attempt in Munich and the 2021 Republican coup attempt in Washington—it's gloomy because it gets the relationship upside down.

Beer Hall Putsch has always been the best Jan 6 comparison

— Paul Lerner (@PFLerner) February 6, 2022

2016 immature movement seizes power constitutionally, with aid of moribund conservative establishment
2020 moribund movement attempts to retain power extraconstitutionally, with aid of (uncooperative) miltary

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

Trump was an old fool in 2016 who failed to learn that constitutionalism had led him to success and did everything worse on his second round.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

For the Record: Good News for Joe Biden—Why That's Bad News for Joe Biden

Remember that Dana Milbank piece about how unfairly the press treats Biden as opposed to Trump at the beginning of December?

Even the extraordinary news that jobless claims had dropped to the lowest level in 52 years came with a qualifier: “BUT, BUT, BUT … don’t expect [the numbers] to immediately change Americans’ negative perceptions of the economy.”

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman taking it, as she seems to take most things, as a personal attack on her, had a pretty snippy subtweet response, to which I happened to respond myself:

Here’s a perfect example, Maggie pic.twitter.com/GYMTpW9TuW

— Rob Wagner 😷😷🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@wagner_rob) December 4, 2021

You haven't read it very well then. Sorry, I really value your work, but you should have found out that the job numbers were drastically and unprecedentedly underestimated through the summer and had to be hugely revised, and that's why we should be skeptical about November.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) December 5, 2021

Because all year, if you were reading, the "mainstream media" had been highlighting monthly job numbers coming in under expectations as DISASTERS FOR BIDEN and, in the very same stories, just whispering the fact that the previous month's numbers were much better than originally reported.

Ukraine Blogging

 

Weird message from Mr. Tucker Carlson a while back that was tagged by some observers, I think correctly, as of Russian origin:

This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States. https://t.co/5JkLuCKoBn

— Alexandra Chalupa (@AlexandraChalup) January 19, 2022

It's easy to call it propaganda, but I'm finding myself inclined to think of it as something a little bit different, really a message from Putin, one in the Whataboutist mode, seriously, asking for just a little understanding, bro—the Russian Federation really is kind of surrounded on its west, by NATO members some of which control nuclear weapons, all along the western borders of Russia or Belarus or Ukraine from Estonia to Turkey, from the north end of the Gulf of Finland to the eastern end of the Black Sea, members of an alliance that was specifically designed 70-odd years ago to thwart Russian movements in that direction. 

Moar Impeachment!

The embarrassing projection doesn't fall far from the tax cheat. pic.twitter.com/RqTY585VEC

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 31, 2022

So I had to take a look at the Breitbart story, which reports:

A criminal IRS investigation into Hunter Biden — President Biden’s son — appears to have convened a grand jury as far back as May 2019, a confidential subpoena served to JPMorgan Chase bank reveals. The subpoena also seeks bank records of James Biden, the president’s brother, which appears to be the first time another Biden family member has surfaced in connection with the investigation.

Actually, this isn't exactly news; it seems to be an investigation we could have known about for quite a while, since December 2020, when Hunter Biden himself found out that his taxes were under investigation, and immediately issued a statement. According to CNN's reporting picked up by Wilmington TV,

Plague notes

Miniature by Pierart dou Tielt illustrating the Tractatus quartus by Gilles li Muisit (Tournai, c. 1353). The people of Tournai bury victims of the Black Death. Wikimedia Commons.

That obnoxious David Leonhardt bothsidesery in The New York Times

Millions of Republican voters have decided that downplaying Covid is core to their identity as conservatives, even as their skepticism of vaccines means that the virus is killing many more Republicans than Democrats.

Millions of Democrats have decided that organizing their lives around Covid is core to their identity as progressives, even as pandemic isolation and disruption are fueling mental-health problems, drug overdoses, violent crime, rising blood pressure, and growing educational inequality. As David Hogg, a gun-control activist, tweeted last year, “The inconvenience of having to wear a mask is more than worth it to have people not think I’m a conservative.”

is pretty obnoxious indeed. 

Insisting that everybody in the car wear a seatbelt, even in the back seat, even when you're only driving a mile to the mall and seatbelts are uncomfortable, may be irrational, though I don't think it is, but it is not the same kind of irrationality as refusing to wear one and attempting to make seat belt requirements illegal. Overstating the danger of falling victim to a pandemic disease that has actually killed close to a million fellow citizens and is currently killing 2,500 Americans per day (it hit almost 4,000 day before yesterday), if anybody is overstating it, is not the same as denying that there's any danger at all worth worrying about and working to outlaw public health measures designed to slow it down. 

Boring Democrats, Always Solving Problems and Shit

 

Image via Nikkei Asia.

Thought I was somewhere back in the 80s yesterday as the stock indexes crashed and soared out of "uncertainty" over inflation, ostensibly, though in fact over the cure for inflation, which includes the Federal Reserve Bank ticking up interest rates. Of course in the mid-80s the federal funds rate was running around 7 or 8%, occasionally higher, and had recently gone as high as 19%, during the Volcker shocks, while now it's effectively zero, with plans to get it up to 0.75% or even 1.0% in the course of the year (those plans could be changing at this very moment, as I type, as the governors are in the first day of their two-day meeting, but it's not considered likely). 

One percent isn't exactly a nightmare, is it?

I found myself wondering about the actual issues that are causing price hikes, the Covid-caused international supply chain breakage and labor shortage, and what the Biden administration is doing about them. Leading up to Christmas, there was a profusion of news coverage of how, basically, Santa's sleigh was stuck on the freeway and everybody's holiday was going to be wrecked by the failure, and how badly the government was handling it, and how the public wasn't impressed (and horserace gossip: when Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg informed the nation in late November that $17 billion had been allocated to keeping the ports working around the clock and other measures, the media coverage was all about the stupid question of whether "Mayor Pete" might challenge Kamala Harris for the vice presidency). And then, after Biden announced on 22 December that, in fact, the toys had all arrived on time, the discussion kind of went quiet.

It took me three or four pages of Google results to get to some circumstantiated coverage, in a pretty unexpected source, Iowa Starting Line (Your Home for Iowa Politics)

The Biden administration on Wednesday [19 January] announced a major effort to address supply chain backlogs caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The federal government released $14 billion to the US Army Corps of Engineers to fund 500 projects, which will make it easier to transport goods, allow the passage of larger ships, and expand capacity at key ports, according to a White House fact sheet.

Also in the same report legislation in the House to do various reforms in the shipping industry to free up movement of goods, introduced by Rep. Cindy Axne (D-IA), which is probably how the story ended up on an Iowa site. Good for her! Show her some love, if you can, and give her some publicity!

But the story of the big Biden initiative, now almost a week old, still hasn't really shown up in the mainstream news sources (a quick Google search finds it's been on ABC and CBS but not in New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC, Politico or Axios, or, like, anywhere people go), and lots of people think the interest rate thing is the only thing the administration is doing about inflation. I guess the political reporters think it's boring. That's why Democrats don't get a break.

Stupid analogies department

 

Sorry, this is kind of childish.

What on earth is going on at The Times? Their attitude toward the Biden presidency is getting downright venomous, as in this latest "Political Memo" by the Times's Nate Silver ersatz, Nate Cohn:

Biden as a New F.D.R.? Try L.B.J.

The president’s agenda — big progressive change — has placed Democratic priorities over the voters’ desire for practical help on the pandemic and inflation.

Venomous and dumb! It's peculiar enough to start with this dichotomy between Johnson as (bad) "progressive" grinding his ideological axe in the people's faces vs. Roosevelt as (good) "centrist" just doing the practical stuff people wanted, as if Roosevelt had done all his planning on the basis of those stupid "most important issue" polls instead of gathering his Brain Trust during the campaign from the most systematically leftist thinking going on at the time outside the actual socialist parties, to design a huge and transformative program of social insurance, regulation of banking and securities industries, and strictly socialist public works programs, based on stringent structural analysis of the economy and ideas for remodeling it through central government planning. Has Cohn ever read a book about the New Deal?

Marco Rubio's Caramel Macchiato

I don't actually do avocado toast at breakfast, because I'm on a three-year yogurt-and-granola binge, and when I take a break from yogurt-and-granola I kind of need bacon, while the rhythm of avocado buying leaves me helplessly making guacamole but really? There's something objectionable in avocado toast? Photo via.

Avocado Toast

By Senator Marco Rubio

Last week, the Vice President of the United States told us that a riot which happened here at the U.S. Capitol last year was equal to the day on which Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor and the U.S. was pulled into a world war that took the lives of 3% of the world's population.

Actually, vice president Harris did not say that. She said,

Certain dates echo throughout history, including dates that instantly remind all who have lived through them where they were, and what they were doing, when our democracy came under assault. Dates that occupy not only a place on our calendars, but a place in our collective memory: December 7th, 1941, September 11th, 2001, and January 6th, 2021.  

That does sound like a suggestion that the 6 January date might "live in infamy", like December 7th and 9/11, and I could add November 22 (after the killing of President John F, Kennedy), or for that matter 8 December 1980 (after the murder of John Lennon), one of the dates you always remember. That is not the same thing. The 9/11 terrorist attack did not lead to the deaths of 3% of the world's population, for instance, but that doesn't mean we don't remember it. Neither did the Pearl Harbor attack, for that matter; the deaths of 3% of the world's population probably go back to 1 September 1939 and the invasion of Poland, which most of us don't remember at all, though we probably should. 

The Lord works in mysterious ways

A piece on Dr. King's theology from this time six years ago holds up well, I think.  

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Panama, in keeping with our annual custom of running a picture of Dr. King in a hat. Via Relaford Club.

Let's not leave the long Martin Luther King Day weekend without our annual tribute visit to the Bizarro Dr. King who usually surfaces in the rightwing media around this time of the year, who if he had been alive would certainly have disapproved of the #BlackLivesMatter movement because they are the "sons and daughters of Stokely Carmichael and, to some extent, even Huey P. Newton" (former moderately good detective novelist Roger L. Simon, via Shakezula), and of the ongoing imaginary War on Police (Fox & Friends, via David at C&L); and Donald Trump, at the Dr. King tributes at Liberty University in the appropriately named Lynchburg, VA., praised the size of the crowd that came to see him as

an honor in terms of Martin Luther King," Trump said. "We're dedicating the record to the late, great Martin Luther King." Trump made no other mention of the civil rights leader.

In my usual stomping grounds at the National Review they haven't been able to come up with anything new this year, but they reran a piece by Lee Habeeb from January 2013:

So what is it to you?

It is my birthday, shared, as some of you know, not only with Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr., but also Intellectual Dank Web philosopher Benjamin "Ben" Shapiro.

I was deeply gratified by this, from a friend:

Seditious Conspiracy

 

Virginian Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell, 67, has denied he was in the building, but the FBI seems to know better.

Whaddaya know Merrick Garland did sumthin. Kind of thought he might one of these days. https://t.co/x6c9oc40Tq

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) January 13, 2022

This is really great news for those who have been worried about the Justice Department approach to 6 January investigations and the apparent focus over the whole past year in its 725 arrests on the misbehavior inside the Capitol on the day itself, and seeming failure to see the conspiratorial context, stretching back to the 2020 election and the existence of a leadership, going very high up, in the neighborhood of Donald J. Trump himself. I mostly felt pretty confident Attorney General Garland was conducting it on the classic model of a mob investigation, doing an exhaustive job on the soldiers and pressing as many of them as possible into cooperation agreements before moving upwards to the leadership and the plan. With the long-awaited arrest of Stewart Rhodes and the charge of seditious conspiracy

Sinemascope

Jeff Darcy, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 28 October 2021.

 

Beating out the perpetually "concerned" Senator Collins in the adjective competition, Senator Sinema is actually  "alarmed", but she's not going to let that spoil her appetite:

Pre-empting a presidential visit to the Capitol to meet privately with Democrats, Ms. Sinema took to the floor to say that while she backed two new voting rights measures and was alarmed about new voting restrictions in some states, she believed that a unilateral Democratic move to weaken the filibuster would only foster growing political division.

“These bills help treat the symptoms of the disease, but they do not fully address the disease itself,” Ms. Sinema said. “And while I continue to support these bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country.”

And "disappointed" too! Collins never imagined being disappointed, that's pretty original!

Literary Corner: Look at Pennsylvania!

 

One way to look at Pennsylvania. Via Philadelphia Magazine.

Look at the Numbers!

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

(after an interview with host Steven Inskeep aired on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, broadcast 12 January 2022)

It was too early to ask for fraud and to talk about fraud.¹
Rudy said that, because of the fact it was very early with the —
because that was obviously at a very, very — that was a long time ago.²
The things that have found out³ have more than bore out
what people⁴ thought and what people felt and what people found.
When you look at Langhofer,⁵ I disagree with him as an attorney.
I did not think he was a good attorney to hire. I don't know
what his game is, but I will just say this: You look⁶ at the findings.
You look⁷ at the number of votes. Go into Detroit and just ask yourself,
is it true that there are more votes than there are voters?⁸
Look at Pennsylvania. Look at Philadelphia.⁹ Is it true that
there were far more votes than there were voters?

¹ That would be 17 November 2020, when attorney Rudolph Giuliani told Judge Matthew Brann in federal court in Williamsport, PA, that two voters in Republican counties were not allowed to fix errors in their mail-in ballots, whereas voters in Democratic counties were: "The best description of this situation is it's a widespread, nationwide voter fraud," he said. 

“It’s a widespread, nationwide voter fraud,” Giuliani said. He accused local election officials of being part of a “little mafia” and preventing Republican Party observers from watching ballots being counted. He said only cities “controlled by Democratic machines” had problems, and “you’d have to be a fool to think this is an accident.”

But when Judge Brann asked him to explain why these fraud allegations were not mentioned in the lawsuit he was litigating, Giuliani acknowledged that "This is not a fraud case." This was not because it was "too early to talk about fraud"; indeed Giuliani had started talking about fraud earlier still, in his celebrated Four Seasons Total Landscaping address on 7 November, the day the election was called:

For the Record: Pipeline Talk

 

Getting Russian natural gas to Europe, via Radio Free Europe. It'l be a lot less complicated once Europe stops using natural gas—may it be soon!—but in the meantime, the Ukraine (the purple line) is not getting replaced...

And now for something completely different:

I have two things I say about this issue: (1) Trump administration had four years to impose sanctions on Russia over the pipeline, and frequently said they were going to do it https://t.co/YqXnHrV9df but never did for some reason...

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) January 12, 2022

Brooks Sights a Squirrel

David F. Brooks phoning it in ("Why Democrats Are So Bad at Defending Democracy"):

Paragraph 3:

As Yuval Levin noted in The Times a few days ago, it’s become much easier in most places to register and vote than it was years ago. We just had a 2020 election with remarkably high turnout.

Paragraph 7:

As my Times colleague Nate Cohn wrote last April, “Expanding voting options to make it more convenient hasn’t seemed to have a huge effect on turnout or electoral outcomes. That’s the finding of decades of political science research on advance, early and absentee voting.”

These two don't actually contradict each other from a strictly logical standpoint, in the sense that Levin probably isn't claiming there is any causal connection between expanded voting options and the 2020 turnout, and Brooks certainly isn't. But the interesting thing is that both points, Cohn's assertion that expanded voting doesn't affect turnout and Levin's that it doesn't not affect turnout, support Brooks's argument here, which is to deny the "myth" that there's a crisis across the US electoral system: In fact there is a crisis, Brooks agrees, but it's only in one part: