News in Centripetality

Image via Wikipedia.

Oh, Axios! Oh, Kraushaar! 

The big picture: For all the talk of a No Labels third-party effort, the reality is that politicians —and by extension, many of their constituents — are still in a no-compromise mood.

• Donald Trump is barreling his way to the Republican nomination, gaining more momentum by the day. President Biden, who has made some moves to the center, hasn't won over many swing voters for his efforts.
• Moderating forces in the Senate like Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) are facing long odds returning after 2024, despite their bipartisan appeal.
• A partisan gerrymander is now likely in North Carolina (after a new state Supreme Court ruling), jeopardizing the prospects of some of the most-moderate Democratic lawmakers in the House.
• If Trump is at the top of the ticket, the 18 House Republicans in districts Biden carried will face existential danger. One House GOP strategist told Axios another Trump nomination would shrink the battleground map and limit the party's appeal in the suburbs.

No, the "No Labels third party effort" is not an effort at "compromise". What's it going to compromise with?  The plan is to offer voters an unpolarized presidential ticket (on the order of Manchin-Sinema) so they don't have to compromise with their deeply held principles and vote for an extremist candidate like Biden. As the No Labels founding chairman, former senator Joe Lieberman put it,

Dude, Where's My Recession?

 

Rezoned development around a suburban transit hub. Image via New Jersey State League of Municipalities.

Happy beginning-of-the-month Freaky Friday, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases last month's job numbers and we sit down to play another round of Good News is Bad News:

I'm looking at this jolly message

Holy moly, we've got another one!

Payrolls grew a huuuuuge +253k in April, well above market expectations. There's no hint of any sort of labor market slowdown in these numbers. Other indicators had been hinting at a slowdown, but these are more reliable.

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) May 5, 2023

and instead of smiling, I'm instantly telling myself ruh-roh, Fed's gonna keep pushing those interest rates up. Bad News! But wondering, can't you let it be Good News for a change, just the one time?

All My Trials

 

Breaking wind ground in Aberdeen. Nobody seems to know how to credit this photo of TFG keeping his ears covered, may have originated here. 

While Donald Trump hides in Scotland from the trial for the defamation and battery (under New York's new Adult Survivor Law) of the writer E. Jean Carroll for raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and then lying about it 20 years later—as it winds toward its close (today Lisa Birnbach, the writer friend Carroll called after the rape, and Jessica Leeds, the woman he assaulted in the first-class section of a flying plane, offered their testimony), I thought it might be fun to do a quick survey of where he stands in his legal situation and, given that there are now a few declared Republican presidential candidates, what effect it might have on the race.

I don't see how there's any possibility he wins this first case. The witness testimony is really compelling, Trump's attorney is nasty and disrespectful, both to plaintiff and to judge (evidently following his client's instructions) and looks like a thug, Trump won't be testifying at all, not that it would help him if he did, and since it's a civil trial the jury's doesn't need to be convinced "beyond a reasonable doubt" but only "by a preponderance of the evidence." On the other hand I imagine he files an appeal immediately, or a whole raft of appeals, indefinitely delaying the actual end of the case, and I'm afraid we won't really feel it's over for months or years.

Brooks on Soul

What is a soul?

asks David F. Brooks ("Joe Biden and the Struggle For America's Soul"), with reference to President Biden's assertion, when he was announcing his candidacy in the 2024 presidential race, that we are still "in a battle for the soul of America," as we were in 2020, when that was Biden's campaign slogan.

Actually it's just a rhetorical question, because he knows the answer. In fact he knows more than one answer, and he also knows which answer Biden has in mind:

Well, religious people have one answer to that question. But Biden is not using the word in a religious sense, but in a secular one. He is saying that people and nations have a moral essence, a soul.

And what the hell is that, when it's at home? A "moral essence"? (Makes me think of the Essence of Chicken that Tiger moms in Southeast Asia give their children to endow them with strength to study harder, or the French word essence meaning "gasoline".) 

Tucker? I hardly know 'er!

 

Everybody has to put in their take on Tucker, I guess, including his pal Glenn Greenwald:

Can't decide whether Grindelwald here is so focused on advancing the Russian program that he can't see anything else or so anxious to change the subject from white nationalism that he can't do anything else https://t.co/KACHRT8PEz

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) April 25, 2023

Or I guess it must be opposite sides of the same coin, Glenn's leftist Putinism (the story that the bloodthirsty US started the war in Ukraine by forcing pacifist Putin to launch another involuntary invasion like those in 2014 or in Georgia in 2008) serving as a beard for the fascist Putinism (Tucker's) he can't quit associating with.

That's basically Glenn's theory of why Carlson was axed at Fox—specifically, over Carlson's "passionate defense" of the four members of the African People's Socialist Front in Florida charged a couple of weeks ago with taking money from Russia's FSB foreign intelligence agency to "covertly sow discord in U.S. society, spread Russian propaganda, and interfere illegally in U.S. elections", or as Glenn puts it, being "dissidents" against US support for Ukraine. 

Got Paranoia? More Stone

 

Brooks Brothers Riot of November 22, 2000. Photo by Colin Braley/Reuters, via Wikipedia.

A gold nugget of fact I had no idea of in a segment on my favorite radio show that was mainly about the Dominion Election Systems settlement with Fox News, but it goes back to a big New York Times report of 2019 on the whole history of the Rupert Murdoch enterprise, by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, that puts an awful lot of things together on Rupert's early days in the US, after he'd bought the New York Post:

In 1980, he met Roy Cohn — the former adviser to Senator Joseph McCarthy and a Trump mentor — who introduced him to Gov. Ronald Reagan’s inner circle. It was a group that included Roger Stone Jr., another Trump confidant and the head of Reagan’s New York operations, who said in a later interview that he helped Murdoch weaponize his latest tabloid purchase, The New York Post, on Reagan’s behalf in the 1980 election. Reagan’s team credited Murdoch with delivering him the state that year — Murdoch gave Stone an Election Day printing plate from The Post over a celebratory meal at the 21 Club — and his administration subsequently facilitated Murdoch’s entry into the American television market, quickly approving his application for American citizenship so he could buy TV stations too.

And Fox Shall Have No Dominion

Posted a response to the settlement of Dominion vs. Fox News on the Substack Wednesday, a little bit depressed along with Steve, and forgot to notify you all here, immersed as I was in the vileness of Milo and Ali and the rest of them, but anyhow it's at the above link, and I think it's got at least half an idea that might be of interest, and to which I might return sometime. If you haven't seen it, you could have a look.

Also on the Substack, a little housekeeping info: I'm still not completely sure what I want to do with it, or exactly why, except that it has to do with the broader project of detaching myself from the Twitter, as Elmo's mismanagement gets to be more and more of a problem—in the latest, celebrating his favorite holiday of 4/20, he took away all the blue checkmarks of verification from those who were verified, while keeping it for the marks who had ponied up $8, so now they are all like the imperial cronies who purchased baronies on the cheap from Napoleon III, so that the check is now literally an indication that the possessor is nobody, like the unfortunate Mr. Turd:

"Just How People Get Into Politics"

 

Marcel Proust's fictional character Palamède de Guermantes, Baron de Charlus, in a drawing by Jean Cocteau, ca. 1921-23, via. 

Warning, this is incredibly distasteful, so much so that I think a lot of journalists are telling themselves it's not newsworthy so they can stop themselves from thinking about it, but if you do think about it, it starts to seem important, as a sign of what the Republican Party is now and where it's going, hopefully toward total collapse.

The story goes back to last January, when the House Republicans were struggling to elect a speaker over the hostage-taking tactics of their most radical faction, not including Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had made some kind of private deal, presumably over committee seats, with Leader Kevin McCarthy, and was supporting him.

Upon which a voice arose from outside of Congress, that of Ali Alexander, organizer of the Stop the Steal movement following the 2020 election and January 6 defendant, in a remarkably vituperative attack on Greene,

You are a harlot and a liar. You supported Q. You talked about Jewish people and now you denounce people who talk about Jewish power? Now you want to act like you're not into conspiracies? Girl, go get your teeth fixed. Mine are crooked cause I'm not a multimillionaire. Why are yours crooked?

culminating in a fairly specific threat:

Ad Insult to Injury

The trial of Fox News for its relentless defamation of Dominion Voting Systems was supposed to be starting this morning, but the opening got postponed for 24 hours, which I guess means the parties are looking at the possibility of a settlement (some radio reporter thought that damages could be lowered from $1.6 billion to $1 billion even, but that the real sticking point for Fox would be Dominion's demand for a public admission of wrongdoing and apology by each of the offending shows). Meanwhile...

Fox News full page ad in NYT this AM on public trust as it seeks to settle ten-figure defamation suit on eve of jury trial pic.twitter.com/MyhbgbSbrg

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) April 17, 2023

Those are some pretty peculiar numbers, as several people were quick to point out, and pretty mysterious as well. You'll note the indication at the bottom says the poll is from 2023, but YouGov hasn't published a version of that poll in 2023, and the last time they did it, in April 2022, they had radically different results, with ABC and CBS both at 38%, CNN at 36%, and Fox News at 30% (MSNBC was at 28%, if you want to know).

In fact, it looks like the thing pictured in the ad isn't the YouGov poll of a representative sample of American adults as we know it at all; as the indication at the bottom clarifies, it's from a different division of the company, YouGov Profiles, which offers business clients analyses of their customer base:

And Then There Were None

Still from Robin and Marian (Richard Lester, 1976).

2/ clear that the bottom has fallen out of DeSantis’s campaign. Given how badly he’s doing there’s a good chance he won’t even run. Unless Trump dies there’s every reason to think he’ll be the gop nominee and there won’t even be much of a primary campaign at all in early 2024. pic.twitter.com/CajhxyJ33O

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 16, 2023

Welp.

The Haley story is from today's Washington Post, and not quite as interesting as it may at first sound. The story is that she has three fundraising committees, a regular presidential campaign committee, a "leadership PAC" from before she got into the presidential race, and a "joint committee"; the joint committee donated almost $3 million of its $4.4 million haul to the other two, and Haley's people counted that money twice when they reported to the press that they'd raised over $11 million in their first six weeks when they'd actually raised more like $8.3 million, and effectively $6.8 million, since the leadership PAC money can't be used for the campaign.

A Bridge Quite Near

Xiamen City, Fujian, China, formerly known as Amoy, as seen from fortified shores of the closest piece of Taiwan, on the Kinmen islands, formerly known as Quemoy. Photo by Reuters via Taipei Times.

The previous post originally went up under the headline "A Bridge Too Far", which couldn't have made a lot of sense (I've changed it). 

The headline belonged to a different piece that got longer and longer and more and more essay-ish and ended up in the Substack, where, as ever, you're welcome to have a look. The Bridge is a conservative intellectual you've never heard of—neither had I before yesterday—called Elbridge A. Colby, who's running the Republican Party's increasing anti-Chinese paranoia.

That Bar Won't Lower Itself

Hi Ben, you know how you were able to learn this? Because the interested parties publicly acknowledged it at the time.

It's Thomas's concealment of his and Mrs. Thomas's financial interests that breaks the law. https://t.co/xCIlueOUB6

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) April 14, 2023

Of course you know what Shapiro's doing here: not trying to demonstrate that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans, but rather that Republican bad things aren't really bad, because Democrats do them too. Look at that Biden! Sweetheart deal! Though it struck me as less than convincingly corrupt, if the value of the Biden house rose by a factor of six in a 20-year period, and a vacant lot not at all in a 5-year period. Why shouldn't that happen? should it have risen by 150% (i.e., one fourth of 600%) because house prices and land prices always change at a perfectly even and commensurable pace? Do they? How about if, while the lot remained undeveloped over the 5 years, they did some work on the house over the 20? What if they did a lot of work? 20 years is a while!

In fact, hard as it may be to believe, Eric got it wrong; it was a real mansion, 10,000 square feet and originally built by the Delaware Du Ponts, but a fixer-upper: in serious disrepair and slated for demolition when Biden picked it up in 1975 (when his salary was $44,600, not $174,000), and he renovated it extensively over the 20 years he lived there. And since, although Ben Shapiro and Eric Trump are evidently unaware of this, inflation exists, you should note that when comparing the prices: in constant 2020 dollars, he paid $895,014.87 for the house in 1975 and sold it in 1996 for $1,990,669.22, so far from sextupling in value, it had not quite doubled.

And even that's not the thing I was wanting to say, which is that even if this deal smelled as bad as Justice Thomas's deals with the billionaire sugar daddy who paid for him and Mrs. Thomas to go on an all-stops-out luxury vacation every year (both side they were vacationing together, but the description of the Indonesian holiday suggests Crow didn't go on that one), set up Mrs. Thomas in her own rightwing think tank where she paid herself a six-figure salary out of the funds he supplied, and bought the house Thomas was raised in by his grandparents so his mother could go on living there without paying any property taxes, along with a some properties on the block including the one next door where his mother felt the tenants were too noisy—even if it smelled that bad, it wouldn't have been illegal, and nor would the money Thomas took.

Because that's not the crime in Thomas's behavior (as far as we know, because nobody's proved it was all bribed): the crime is failure to report it.

And Biden reported it all, as he was required by law to do, and Thomas just didn't. And it doesn't matter in the least how deep and personal and satisfying his friendship with Mr. Crow was; he should have reported the transportation, the direct money and real estate gifts, and the wingnut welfare funding, regardless. 

There's a lot of this going on, trying to persuade the rubes that their boy was charged with a crime they weren't charged with—the most thorough effort has been the one saying Donald Trump was busted for bonking a porn star, which is idiotic and of course a bald lie: he was busted for falsifying business records of the payments his company made to silence the porn star (and maybe the Playboy Centerfold model as well, in a superseding indictment, because it was David Pecker who paid for that and they did interview him), in order to hide them from the public, because he didn't want voters to know in such detail about his bonking habits so soon after the appearance of the pussy-grabber tape; because the money the three of them (Pecker, Cohen, and Trump) spent on it consisted of illegal campaign contributions and illegally unreported loans, illegally structured and laundered in hope they wouldn't get caught.

Nobody's going to arrest you for consensual bonking! We're following the money!

And finally, there's Representative Empty Greene:

 No, Margie. His name is Jack, for starters. But not that there's anything especially wrong with white, male, Christian, or even antiwar (though this old hippie doesn't believe Empty Greene is really antiwar). That's shit that can happen to anybody. Texeira was arrested and charged for stealing sensitive military information and sharing it with people who didn't have the security qualifications to look at it.That's espionage. That's spying. And when Trump was doing it it was spying too. Don't tell me he was just doing it for entertainment, because that doesn't matter.

The Man in the Net

I think what I'm going to be using the Substack for might be less bloggy, more formally organized approaches to things I've touched on here, as in this piece, on the current legal situation of the Former Guy. The literary work is literary, but supposed to be clarifying the material, not making it fancier. The work involved in tightening it up somehow generates new stuff, whether it's new metaphors or new bibliographical references. Still free!

Teh Stupid It Burns

 

Image by Lightspring/Shutterstock via Psychology Today.

I can't get over how bogus this whole Texas Mifepristone case is, from start (the lawsuit was originally filed by a group calling itself the "Alliance Defending Freedom", because nothing spells freedom like getting the state to block women from taking control over their own bodies) to finish. 

The five (5)  pieces of by now completely outdated research the anti-abortion faction has been pulling out of its briefcases for the last 23 years to "prove" Mifeprestone was dangerous didn't prove anything of the kind, The New York Times reported in an exhaustive report covering over a hundred (100) different up-to-date studies on Friday:

Trouble With a Capital T

 

Spooky things are happening in the world of social or semi-social media, not just at Twitter. I saw this note about Facebook's Instagram platform today

Instagram "removed" one of my stories from 2 years ago that showed one of those old timey KKK warnings for Africans to not go to communist meetings because it "violates guidelines" and barred me from using paid branding tools lol is there a purge on the horizon?

— Flying Chaucer (@lelianadelrey) April 8, 2023

and in fact last week I went through something similar myself at Blogger, the Google subsidiary that generously provides this space for free to me and Steve and Roy (Alicublog) and huge numbers of people like us to expose our thinking to public notice; I had three old posts "unpublished" on grounds that it had been flagged by some anonymous user and found on review to violate Blogger's "Malware and Virus Policy", which is weird, because I'm not aware of passing on any malware or viruses at all, though I can imagine being found offensive from time to time to some sensitive soul and getting in trouble with the community guidelines that way.

Disorganized Crime

Disorganized Crime, 1989

Frank Wilhoit in comments:

"...don't think he's got the stuff or the staff [to do a full-scale Netanyahu and get elected]..." How are you using the word "got" here? He has been kiting off free media the whole time. Negative partisanship is the wind beneath his stubby little wings, and it is now self-perpetuating. Trump has no friends, no admirers, no sympathizers, never has had; he is purely an avatar for the rural mindset. Any avatar would do: undeniably he has been, down to now, a very good one, but there is a structural imperative to keep escalating, and I do not take for granted that Trump will be able to win that race to the bottom. Someone will arise who will outflank him on the right. The Republican nomination will go to someone who says -- explicitly, no more codetalk, no more allegories, no more private-versus-public: "You, the People, will save America, and you will do it by killing all the liberals, and I will bless you and hold you harmless."

And my response:

I meant "in his body" and "on the payroll". He's a racket boss. That doesn't mean he's a mastermind who works his will through his employees. Rather he's the flag under which they—from Stone and Bannon and Graham down through low-rent crooks like Boris Epshteyn and Jason Miller—have sought to work theirs. "Our boy can become president!" said Felix Sater to Michael Cohen. He was right on that, on two things: he did become president, and he was their boy—he doesn't own them, they own him. They're not the reason he became president, but they sustained him while it was happening, and I personally don't think they can do it again, I think the legal actions especially in Washington are giving them a very hard time (one of the reasons the New York demonstration was so pathetic yesterday was that so many guys who knew how to organize such things in 2021 are in jail or under indictment themselves), and many of the conditions that favored Trump in 2016 have changed.

I agree with you, of course, on the nature of his relationship to the Republican Party (except to note a good number of professional politicians have been willing to serve the mob as his employees, courtiers, couriers, court jesters, enforcers, "friend" simulacra, to be his made men as it were, while others are just using that flag to make their own political connections with the rustics).

For the Record: Arraignment Day Notes

 

Won't have time tonight to do a proper writeup. Here are some Twitter observations from the day:

If you don't like our juries, find someplace else to do your crimes https://t.co/Kcef7EndFS via @TPM

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) April 4, 2023

We just announced a 34-count felony indictment of former President Donald J. Trump. Learn more: https://t.co/PTTh2zlsvv pic.twitter.com/IUE6JjdrS2

— Alvin Bragg (@ManhattanDA) April 4, 2023

The Trump Tower doorman is in there along with McDougal and Daniels pic.twitter.com/HzUKjoHSia

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) April 4, 2023

Link to Statement of Facts https://t.co/ft83IpA8HW

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) April 4, 2023

But the Statement of Facts is a lot more narrative:

This is so Trumpy--and no, he wasn't worried about Mrs. Trump. He didn't care as long as nobody found out before the election pic.twitter.com/0FF6neAL9g

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) April 4, 2023

Witness tampering is not a separate count, but it's part of the story pic.twitter.com/zgoWYpvxmq

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) April 4, 2023

Lawyer C seems to be Costello

The theory is that you don't have to formally charge the crimes in aid and concealment of which the false statements were made, though you do have to prove them—they've got plenty of evidence on that, and enough of those crimes are crimes in New York State that it can't be criticized for belonging to federal law. I think the case is a winner, in principle, though that doesn't mean it has to win.

Looks like it'll be quite a while before the thing comes to trial—10 months or a year. It could imaginably be over by the time of the Republican convention, but Trump's ability to delay is legendary. I don't think it makes his nomination any less likely—the party will be denying there's any possibility of a guilty verdict until there actually is a guilty verdict. If there were no further indictments after this, it could go on forever, though I don't think he's got the stuff or the staff to do a full-scale Netanyahu and get elected.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Beyond Belief

Well, I guess at least we know now what would happen if Trump really did pull out a gun on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody dead. The Manhattan DA would see to it that he got arrested if the cops didn't arrest him immediately, and everybody from Glenn Youngkin to Lauren Boebert would put out a strong statement condemning the politicization of New York's law enforcement community ("If they can come for Donald Trump, they can come for you!"). The otherwise fractious Republican party would be absolutely united in not mentioning that the former guy had, in fact, killed somebody. They could be showing the video on CNN and the Republicans would be shouting prosecutorial abuse, and probably racism ("Would anybody call for arresting Barack Obama on the basis of these flimsy allegations? No, it's only white ex-presidents who get treated this way!") and there'd be CNN pundits waggling their heads in agreement.

If it's beyond belief, Glenn, then stop believing it. Or pretending to believe it, as the case may be. What's a "manufactured basis" for an arrest? Do you mean it was manufactured by the federal prosecutors in December 2018 in the sentencing memo for Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen, for his felonious structuring of hush money payments that Donald Trump ordered him to do?

Attorneys from the Southern District of New York state explicitly in the court filing that Cohen “acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1” in handling payments to two women who claimed to have an affair with Trump long before the election. Trump is identified in this and other filings by U.S. attorneys as “Individual-1,” who “was elected President.” (The women are Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels.)

Like nowadays it's not good enough for an indictment to be legally correct, it has to be original too?

Does Trump's Prosecution Set a Dangerous Precedent? No. In Fact It's a Really Good Precedent.

Hogback Bridge, Winterset, Iowa. Were you aware that Joe Biden owns it, and falsely valued it at $100 million in his application for a $100 million business loan for his failing Madison County real estate organization, thus committing serious bank fraud? No? That's mainly because he doesn't—he doesn't have any business interests in Iowa at all, so the likelihood of the Madison County DA slapping him with a financial fraud indictment is really very small. You have to go where the financial crimes are committed, which is especially Manhattan for Donald Trump, who's been committing financial crimes there for decades, and pretty much noplace for Joe Biden, who isn't a businessman. Maybe you can nail him for sex trafficking in Florida, or issuing threats in Texas, but  I kind of doubt it. Via EncirclePhotos.

The singularly clueless former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori offering his opinion to The New York Times ("Trump's Prosecution Has Set a Dangerous Precedent"):

How could something so big — the first criminal indictment of an American president — seem so small?

Mr. Trump was not indicted for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election or for engaging in egregious financial fraud to increase his wealth or even for allegedly obstructing the special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation...

Yet.

He was not indicted for those crimes by the Manhattan grand jury, which doesn't have jurisdiction in the first and third cases. The Manhattan district attorney's office and the state's attorney general are in fact collaborating in a civil rather than criminal case on a lot of Trump's financial fraud, $250 million worth, which, if successful, will put an end to Trump's ability to do business in New York, and these people have succeeded before, in smaller but similar cases, in wiping out the Trump University and Trump Foundation frauds (with Alvin Bragg in charge, in the latter case as chief deputy attorney general), and making restitution to their victims.

Literary Corner: Who Is Your Retribution?

Yoon Lee, "Retribution (Bud)", 2014, from a 2015 show at Pierogi Gallery, New York. 

You Remember It Just Like I Do

By Donald J. Trump, President of the United States (Semi-Retired), with Stephen Miller

This is Political Persecution
and Election Interference
at the highest level in history. From the time
I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower,
and even before I was sworn in as your President
of the United States, the Radical Left Democrats -
the enemy of the hard-working Men and Women of this Country -
have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy
the Make America Great Again movement.

You remember it just like I do:
Russia, Russia, Russia;
the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine;
Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2;
the illegal and unconstitutional
Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.

The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen
in their obsession with trying to "Get Trump,"
but now they've done the unthinkable -
indicting a completely innocent person
in an act of blatant Election Interference.

Never before in our Nation's history
has this been done. The Democrats
have cheated countless times over the decades,
including spying on my campaign,
but weaponizing our justice system
to punish a political opponent,
who just so happens to be a President
of the United States and by far
the leading Republican candidate
for President, has never happened before.
Ever.

Let's just say for starters he doesn't "just so happen" to be a President of the United States. 

Going For Woke

Via Vox.

I'm always pleased to see somebody I admire catching up with some ideas I've been cherishing for a while, even more so when they're using words I might well have used myself, as in this from Washington Post's Greg Sargent on dated concepts of the US working class:

In the emerging Democratic reading, the old vision of a White, male, breadwinning working class concentrated in burly jobs shapes much political analysis, but it’s a pundit fiction. With service, retail and health-care sectors growing as manufacturing and mining jobs dwindle, the new working class is far more ethnically and culturally diverse — and more socially liberal — than commonly supposed.

What he's commenting on is the remarkable string of progressive legislation that's been coming out of Michigan all year since Democrats captured the state legislature in spite of its gerrymandering, most recently when they repealed the state's "right-to-work" law, enacted in 2012 to combat unions by disallowing closed shops so that workers could benefit from union contracts without paying union dues. 

For the Record: Costa Bravo

 Getting updated occasionally.

The leaks are coming from inside the pipe. Via.

When Costa's sources are getting interrogated we're getting to the end https://t.co/4fySdOjr0l

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 27, 2023

War Between the Orthodoxies

 

This tanky website

Zelensky's war on Orthodoxy continues, as a priest is apprehended during a service in Chernivtsi, far West Ukraine.

Are these "Western values"? pic.twitter.com/GSbVWQnJs1

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) March 24, 2023

(where by "tanky", I mean "person who sees Putin as the heir to Stalin and thinks that's a good thing" for the world proletarian revolution, even if thinking so involves trying to think that a good Marxist is obliged to give deference to the Russian Orthodox church because "Western values") is engaging in some especially vicious propaganda, obviously not as bad as the continuing claims that Ukraine is run by Nazis, but in the same family. I think I've touched on this before, but I need to go through it in some detail, because it's just too wrong to be borne.

For the Record: Parental Rights

 

From New Adventures of Superboy #1 (January 1980). Art by Kurt Schaffenberger, via Wikipedia.

When Republicans talk about "parents' rights", they don't mean parents' rights to support their kids in growing up--they mean parents' rights *against* their kids, rights of an owner over a possession.

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 24, 2023

Pretty sure I really mean that. People affecting to believe in a big sociocultural wokery conspiracy trying to change "our society" (the society those gents thought they owned) are at bottom angry with their kids or grandkids or nieces and nephews, for being smarter and stronger and better looking and eventually getting more sex no doubt (that's the human condition all parents must live with), but more particularly for challenging their authority—not just for being irreligious or sexually different, though those obviously matter when they happen, but especially for being broad-minded, not narrow, liberal for want of a better word, going beyond what the previous generation wanted to allow. I'm not saying all conservative parents are like this, either, or that only conservative parents have conflicts with their kids, but that this particular kind of conflict is directly connected to this particular kind of political conservatism.

The Great Awokening

Drawing by Carl Newman (1858-1932), Smithsonian Museum of American Art via Wikimedia Commons.

Headline courtesy of Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, who has decided to take on the job of defining "woke" ("What It Means to be Woke") in a style that really looks intended in a kind of admirable way, attempting to get inside the viewpoint of people who might be called "woke" themselves, of "the left" with its traditional aims of transforming the ideals of liberty and equality into "lived realities", and with a certain amount of initial respect. It's just a fantasy, of course, he isn't asking any members of the "woke left" to tell him what they think, he's just making it up out of his own expert punditry, but does sound as if he means to understand it: 

For the Record: What Was That Civil War About, Anyway?

 

Blacks in the Civil War. Until very recently, the list of Civil War casualties stopped about about 620,000 dead. but this was missing something like 130,000 Black combatants killed by Confederate and in some cases Union troops, and mostly by the same enemies that killed most of the white troops: pneumonia, yellow fever, and smallpox.

Some Lost Cause buffoon defending the original (1865) Ku Klux Klan in the course of yet another version of the beloved claim that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery: 

"the southern people" meaning the white citizens, of course; the formerly enslaved being not people, or not southern, or both?

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 20, 2023

New Light on a Familiar Conspiracy

"October surprise" via Merriam-Webster website.

I hate the American "paranoid style" in its usual rightwing form and in the leftwing form too, but there are some conspiracy theories that are just the right size and weight, and of these my favorite, possibly, is that of the 1980 October surprise, when somebody in the Reagan presidential campaign, most probably the old spymaster and future CIA director Bill Casey, is said to have worked to torpedo the Carter administration's negotiations with the revolutionary government of Iran and get the Iranians to delay the release of their American hostages until after the election, to stop the Carter campaign from benefiting from it, promising them that a Reagan administration would give them a better deal than Carter. 

The theory didn't in the end work in the most explicit form, that developed by journalist Robert Parry—Casey hadn't been visiting the places he was said to be—but that didn't mean it was wrong, just that the narratology wasn't adequately developed, and a lot of people continued to think there was something to it, including expert Gary Sick, and by at least some reports President Carter himself, and now there's something else, reported in today's Times by Peter Baker of all people: a story of how Casey may have planned the operation but the go-between was somebody else, former Texas governor John Connally, on a somewhat mysterious series of trips to the Middle East in summer 1980 on which he was accompanied by a rising young Texas Republican called Ben Barnes.

It's Barnes, now 85, who is telling the story, apparently struck by remorse at having kept it quiet for so long and moved by the condition of the former president, now in hospice care:

The Emperor's New Dog-Whistle

Yesterday's discussion has gotten very "interesting" from the standpoint of our pugnacious new friend Alfredo, but my understanding of what's interesting is different from his, and I'm bowing out of it after one last word, suggested this morning at Roy's place: the last word being "n****r-lover".

The progress from “n****r-lover” to “woke” as the favored pejorative of bigots could make for a book-length study; but I will say the earlier, cruder version had this much going for it: It didn’t come with a bunch of alleged intellectuals trying to explain it.

Except I don't think it needs a book. Rather, the progress involved is pretty simple: "woke" means "n****r-lover" with deniability. That is, it is "n****r-lover" for those who would like to deny that they're the kind of person who uses "n****r-lover". With the scent of Black English Vernacular (as I noted somewhere in the comments) giving it a Trumpy kind of pungency (like Trump's use of "nationalist"—"but I'm not supposed to use that word"—when he wants to confess, with deniability, that he's a Nazi). Much more satisfyingly vulgar than the whiny old standby "politically correct".

What Woke Means

 

No, she's not an "idiot". What the clip reveals is something else.

It's that use of the words "woke" or "wokeness" by people like her has no publicly acceptable content. It's pure nastiness and spite. She can't define it without displaying how cruel her mind is.

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 15, 2023

Though she adds that she devoted a whole chapter in her book to defining "wokeness", so she must have an idea of some sort, and I thought of checking it out. The book being Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, by Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz and published by Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire Books. There's no online preview, but the authors' promo op-ed in the New York Post did in fact offer a bit of an effort at unpacking the meaning as the authors use the term, as an "ideology" to which they are apparently opposed. Only I'm sorry to say it quickly fell into a pit of circularity and never really re-emerged:

Literary Corner: Nicely, Nicely

As you know, former vice president and reputed presidential candidate Michael Pence boldly confided to the attendees of the Gridiron Dinner on Saturday (no cameras), that the Former Guy's launch of his irregulars' attack on the Capitol was constitutionally ill-founded, and also insensitive to Pence's personal needs: 

“President Trump was wrong; I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence told the gathering of reporters and politicians on Saturday. “And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

I'm sure he's right and January 6 will live in infamy as Pence Family Endangerment Day. 

Meanwhile,  the Former was quick to respond, basically, that Pence had endangered himself:

The Cancel Culture Was Calling From Inside the House

 

From the farewell column kissing all us Mongoloids goodbye.

This is from behind a paywall at Vanity Fair, but I'm reading it at Alternet: Rod Dreher, writer at The American Conservative now living as an expatriate in Hungary, has been fired as a columnist at the instance of the donor who has paid his 6-figure salary for the last 12 years, banking heir Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who felt Dreher's columns (published by special arrangement directly to TAC's website "without any revisions or legal oversight," we're told) "had simply gotten too weird."

He has warned that so-called sissy hypnosis porn is 'profoundly evil;' detailed the 'formal' Catholic exorcism of a friend's suicidal wife; and recalled—in unsettling detail—the time he witnessed a Black classmate's uncircumcised penis.

The last was the memorable reference to the "primitive root wiener" in October 2021, which may be what Ahmanson regarded as the coup de gross. Rod will continue to function as an editor at large, but has taken his writings to Substack.

I don't have anything particular to say about it, except to note once again, for the record, that when cancel culture really strikes it tends to attack from the right.

Today in Conservatives Are Too Emotional

 

Image by Ben Allan/Political Quarterly UK.

Listen, I know it's a huge challenge to ask a conservative to think mathematically, but just make an effort for once. The reason it's called "affirmative action" is that it's not negative. It doesn't take anything away from anybody. https://t.co/w4mRTykC7Q

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 8, 2023

A Little Hopy-Changier

Palestinian farmer in Tubas, West Bank, after planting an olive tree, 2014. And in 2023...

BBC yesterday morning ran an interview on the Israel situation with retired general Dan Halutz, who was chief of staff of the IDF in 2005-07, and who said something that surprised me: that the reason Prime Minister Netanyahu is pushing so hard on these constitutional changes (they're kind of a national version of the Independent Legislature theory, taking away the Supreme Court's ability to practice judicial review and giving the Knesset power to override Supreme Court rulings, and also to put the nomination of judges wholly in the power of the government, i.e. of the prime minister and cabinet) is to increase his chances of staying out of prison. Period.

The interviewer (the great Rasia Iqbal) was surprised too, and made him repeat it—to the effect of (as I remember it, I don't have a transcript): "You're really saying that the prime minister wants to change the Basic Law to keep himself out of prison?" "Of course!" Halutz said. "Well, for one thing."

Pandemic lies

 Nate Silver, on venues where he's frightened of catching COVID-19:

LOL the Louvre's only crowded in the one spot pic.twitter.com/tGfkE9tRcP

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2023

While just across the room... pic.twitter.com/UuYQCm7AOx

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2023

I don't know how commonplace this knowledge is, but in my younger years, when I had a number of opportunities to visit the Louvre, I learned that you shouldn't bother to try to look at the Mona Lisa, because you won't be able to. There are too many bourgeois there with their checklists of things you have to do in Paris, and looking at the Mona Lisa, the all-time no. 1 greatest painting ever, is the thing they need to do, and be photographed doing, when they go to the Louvre, and they've always got it surrounded, whenever you can get into the museum. The biggest and most ironical thing being that right there in the same space was a spectacularly complicated and gorgeous Leonardo that nobody was looking at, depicting a Virgin sitting on her mother's lap as the baby Jesus plays with a baby lamb, and these fantastical landscape configurations, that you can stare at forever.

And Moar Yellow Peril

 

Via Wikipedia.

The other thing I wanted to say about the lab leak hypothesis goes more or less like this: 

We don't know anything with "high confidence" about whether the SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory or not, but we do know with a good deal of certainty that if it did, it's the first pandemic virus to have originated that way.

While there is quite a long history of pandemics and epidemics that got started with what's called a zoonotic transfer of some infectious agent, virus or bacteria or fungus or parasite, to a human population: Ebola and HIV, bird flu and swine flu, measles and smallpox, hantoviruses and cold-causing coronaviruses, not to mention SARS-CoV-1 and MERS and RSV, and of course bubonic plague, the king of them all. 

Of course it's also true that the kind of research the lab leak partisans are most interested in hinting at, in which scientists might have, say, taken some coronavirus found in bats and purposely made it more capable of jumping to humans, has only been possible in the last ten or twelve years in the advent of the CRISPR technique, so it wouldn't have happened very often, at least not yet. On the other hand, however, the other scenario, of a virus or other pathogen leaping from its normal animal host to a human, happens literally all the time. Most pathogens new to the human race are the results of such a spillover. While scientists believed for a long time that the spillover event is pretty rare, I learned from a recent NPR report that it actually isn't rare at all; it just usually isn't possible to say how it happened: