Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

Daddy Issues

December 30, 2024 – 11:55 am

When Elon tweets something and when Trump tweets something,
Republicans don’t know who their Daddy is.

– Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

This week’s featured post is “Cracks in the MAGA Coalition“.

This week everybody was talking about Jimmy Carter

President Jimmy Carter died Sunday at the age of 100, after 22 months in hospice care.

Carter was president from 1977 to 1981. His single term was marred by high inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis, but looks much better in retrospect than it did at the time. I find myself pining for the roads not taken. Carter created possibilities which his successors did not pursue, and the world is worse for America’s failure to follow his lead.

Carter was the first president to recognize global warming as a problem. He installed solar panels on the White House roof (which his successor, Ronald Reagan, promptly removed). While the country did not take the path to sustainable energy he envisioned, much of the sustainable energy used today is based on research funded under his presidency. Rolling Stone makes the case that he was America’s Greatest Environmental President.

In 1978, he brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin together to negotiate the Camp David Accords. The two countries have not fought a war since, and for a time, peace in the Middle East seemed possible.

Today, Carter is best known for his post-presidency. He ran for president in 1976 as a born-again Christian, and his subsequent life exemplified the Christ-like values so often lacking in Evangelical leaders. He and his wife Rosalynn (who died in 2023 after 77 years of marriage) championed Habitat for Humanity, and into their 90s were still swinging hammers to build houses for the poor. The Carter Center has been a voice for peace, democracy, and human rights for more than 40 years.

After his presidency, he returned to his farm in Plains, Georgia. He regularly taught Sunday school classes at his church. (My sister recently posted a picture she and her husband took with the Carters after attending his class in 2015.)

His death should remind us all of an era when we expected our leaders to be virtuous people — and occasionally they even were.

Jay Kuo posted a charming memory about meeting Rosalynn Carter when he was a child.

and US expansion

Recently Trump has tweeted about a variety of possible “territorial expansions” of the US — conquests, really, because there’s no sign any of these folks want to be part of the MAGA empire.

Greenland. On December 22nd, Trump released a statement that “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” Apparently, having Greenland continue as a territory of our NATO ally Denmark is not good enough.

And you’ll never guess why we have to take over Greenland: global warming. Here’s former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien on Fox News:

It’s strategically very important to the Arctic which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal.

So climate change is a hoax when we’re talking about limiting the burning of fossil fuels, but it’s absolutely real when it justifies taking territory from our NATO allies or ruling indigenous peoples against their will.

Panama Canal. On Christmas, Trump charged that Chinese soldiers are operating in the Canal Zone illegally. (A Hong Kong based corporation has the contract to manage two ports near the Canal’s entrances. That’s the closest anyone has come to making sense out of Trump’s ridiculous claim.) He suggested that the spirit of the agreement through which the US returned the Zone to Panama in 1999 has been violated, and said he was going to demand it back.

James Fallows (who during the Carter administration was involved in formalizing the treaties that returned the Canal to Panama) covers all this in much more detail. The push to return the Canal to Panama, he says, originally came from the military, which doubted its ability to defend the Canal if the local population viewed it as an enemy occupation. (If you’re worried about Chinese influence now, imagine if they could arm an indigenous uprising.) That’s why he estimates the chances of the US actually retaking the Canal by force as “zero”.

The issues Trump raises about Chinese soldiers and discriminatory pricing are complete fantasies.

Fallows also points out that the Canal is a climate-change issue: Operating the locks requires water, and depends on rainfall in the local watershed. Lately that rainfall has been declining.

Canada. This is almost certainly trolling on Trump’s part. In his Christmas message he tried to appeal to Canada’s citizens: If they became “the 51st state”, he claimed, their taxes would go down and they’d reap all kinds of benefits. (Of course they’d also lose their health coverage, and their life expectancy would probably drop 3 1/4 years to match ours.)

I find myself unmoved by these visions, which I suspect are entirely vaporous. (In other words, I don’t expect to see US aircraft carriers move to menace Nuuk.) During Trump’s first term, Rachel Maddow used to say, “Watch what they do, not what they say“, implying that Trump might be doing something behind the scenes that contradicted his public rhetoric. The same thing applies here, but in reverse: He’s saying things that will excite his base and inflame his critics, but I suspect no action will result. So I refuse to be inflamed.

Liberals often suggest that Trump’s outlandish rhetoric is supposed to distract us from something else he’s doing. But here I think his own supporters are the target, and they’re supposed to overlook what he isn’t doing. Trump is not going to cut trillions from the federal budget, he’s not going to lower the price of eggs or gas, and if you’re not rich you won’t notice whatever tax cut you get. But if he can get his supporters excited about Greenland and Panama, they may not notice the bankruptcy of his other promises.

Fallows has this right: The point of Trump’s rhetoric is to stoke his followers’ sense of grievance.

and Matt Gaetz

Just as I was getting ready to post last week, the House Ethics Committee released its report on Matt Gaetz.

In sum, the Committee found substantial evidence of the following:

  • From at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gaetz regularly paid women for
    engaging in sexual activity with him.
  • In 2017, Representative Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.
  • During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions.
  • Representative Gaetz accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in
    connection with a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts.
  • In 2018, Representative Gaetz arranged for his Chief of Staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent.
  • Representative Gaetz knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the Committee’s investigation of his conduct.
  • Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House. Based on the above, the Committee concluded there was substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress

The 42-page report outlines that “substantial evidence”. Gaetz’ protest is that the Justice Department also investigated him and did not press charges, which he (falsely) claims “exonerates” him.

Reading the report, you can see how many of the witnesses might not be credible in court, where a beyond-reasonable-doubt standard would apply to any criminal charges. In court, Gaetz’ refusal to answer questions or explain his actions would not count against him.

However, the evidence in the report is quite persuasive if the question is “Should this man be in Congress?” or “Should this man be Attorney General?”. I find it striking that the dissenting opinion at the end of the report says “While we do not challenge the Committee’s findings …” and only protests that the report should not have been released after Gaetz resigned from the House. In short, not even the Republicans on the committee were willing to defend Gaetz’ conduct or claim the process had been “weaponized” against him, as Gaetz himself claimed.

and you also might be interested in …

Whooping cough is on the rise, largely because fewer children are being vaccinated for it. Cases are up five times over last year’s totals.

You might naively think that as sea levels rise, they’ll rise the same amount everywhere. Apparently this is not true. The US Southeast seems unusually prone to sea-level rise, with an increase of seven inches since 2010 in some places.

Now that the Supreme Court has banned universities from considering race in their admissions process, Black enrollment in elite programs has dropped. Harvard Law School has 19 incoming Black students, down from 43 the previous year.

It makes headlines when police kill some unarmed person of color for no justifiable reason, but such incidents are comparatively rare. More significant, this WaPo article claims, are the less extreme but more-or-less constant abuses dished out to women, the poor, and the homeless.

I remember a similar point being made after the killing of Michael Brown started demonstrations and violence in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. The national coverage focused on that particular death and the conflicting accounts of what really happened. To the community, though, the killing was just an extreme example of what they saw every day.

SkepChick thinks the case against black plastic utensils has been overblown.

and let’s close with something timely

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, when many of you will be tempted to make resolutions. Resolutions, as we all know, are extraordinarily hard to keep. The ideas always sound great: Who doesn’t want to exercise more and read more and learn a new language? But there are reasons you have lived your whole life so far without doing those things, and those reasons don’t go away just because you get a new calendar.

So more often than not, making a resolution is just setting yourself up for failure. But there is an alternative: CGP Grey suggests declaring a theme for your year rather than committing to specific goals you will probably not achieve.

So rather than commit to read one book a week, you could declare 2025 the Year of Reading. It’s a softer goal, one that will allow you to try, fail, and come back to try again. Or rather than committing to lose 15 pounds, run two miles a day, and become a vegetarian, you might declare a Year of Health. Each day, you might remind yourself that you’re trying to be healthier this year. And who knows? Maybe you will be.

Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (12)

Cracks in the MAGA Coalition

December 30, 2024 – 9:51 am

Fractures are already showing in the MAGA coalition,
and they haven’t even taken power yet.

When a party out of power suddenly finds itself on the verge of taking control of the White House and both houses of Congress, you’d expect to find them coasting on a wave of good feeling. Victory salves all wounds, so everybody should be ready to dance with everybody else at the inaugural balls.

Strangely, though, MAGAWorld is full of conflict these days. One Trump-supporting fascist (Steve Bannon) is calling another Trump-supporting fascist (Elon Musk) a “toddler” who needs a “wellness check” from Child Protective Services. And American workers, says Vivek Ramaswamy, can’t compete with immigrants because they suffer from our “culture”, which venerates mediocrity over excellence.

But wait: Isn’t the whole point of Trumpism that “real” (i.e. White Christian) Americans are victims of the liberal Deep State that wants to “replace” them with brown-skinned Third Worlders? What’s going on?

First skirmish: Foreign investment. Trump owes his election to two groups whose interests don’t match up: White working class voters and ultra-rich technology barons like Elon Musk. During the campaign, Trump could keep his plans vague enough that both were satisfied, and many low-wage workers could imagine that the richest man in the world was their friend.

But now that the election is over, the question keeps coming up: Who’s the real president, Trump or Elon? At first I interpreted such comments as Democratic trolling, trying to stir up trouble in MAGAWorld by taking advantage of Trump’s ego. (I remember in his first term how similar questions about Mike Pence riled him. Speculation at the time was that Trump would bask in the glory of the presidency, leaving Pence to do the actual work of governing.)

But more and more, there seems to be something to the murmurs. The move to reject a compromise and risk a government shutdown last week started with Musk, and Trump eventually got on board. Musk was the leader and Trump the follower.

Support for the stopgap spending bill then collapsed, forcing [House Speaker Mike] Johnson and his leadership team to scramble to find an alternative path forward. As they did, Musk celebrated, proclaiming that “the voice of the people has triumphed”.

It may be more accurate, however, to say that it was Musk’s voice that triumphed.

In the end, Congress passed a continuing resolution that still included the most important extras Democrats wanted: rebuilding the Key Bridge in Baltimore and disaster relief. And it kept government spending at basically the levels set before Republicans took control of the House two years ago.

Trump did not get the extra he wanted: suspending or eliminating the debt limit. But Musk did get what he wanted: The original proposal included an “outbound investment” provision limiting how American companies could invest in China.

We have heard for years about the problem of manufacturing businesses shipping jobs overseas to China, with its low worker wages and low environmental standards. China typically forces businesses wanting to locate factories in its country to transfer their technology and intellectual property to Chinese firms, which can then use that to undercut competitors in global markets, with state support.

Congress has been working itself into a lather about China for years now, and they finally came up with a way to deal with this issue. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have the flagship bill, which would either prohibit U.S. companies from investing in “sensitive technologies” in China, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or set up a broad notification regime around it.

One corporation that would be affected by this is Musk’s Tesla.

Elon Musk’s car company has a significant amount of, well, outbound investment. A Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai opened in 2019; maybe a quarter of the company’s revenue comes from China. Musk has endorsed building a second Tesla factory in China, where his grip on the electric-vehicle market has completely loosened amid domestic competition. He is working with the Chinese government to bring “Full Self-Driving” technology to China, in other words, importing a technology that may be seen as sensitive. Musk has battery and solar panel factories that are not yet in China, but he may want them there in the future.

Lo and behold: The outbound investment provision vanished from the final version of the continuing resolution. In other words, Republicans in Congress spent their negotiating chips getting what Musk wanted, not what Trump wanted.

Second skirmish: H-1B visas. A second conflict is still playing out: One of the most important issues for the MAGA base is immigration, and in particular protecting the jobs of American citizens from immigrant competition. “They’re taking American jobs” is one of the most effective attacks on immigrants at all levels, even the ones working jobs hardly any Americans want, like picking crops by hand or watching rich people’s kids for practically no pay.

However, American corporations have a different agenda: They want to hire the best people in the world and pay them as little as possible. This is not new. America has been draining the brains of the world at least since the 1930s, when Jews and other anti-fascists escaped from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. We may sympathize with the American physicists who suddenly had to compete with the likes of Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, or American actresses who lost roles to Marlene Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr, but in retrospect it’s hard to feel bad about letting those people into our country.

Similarly today, the US tech industry employs foreign-born workers in jobs many Americans would undoubtedly like to have. The legal vehicle that allows this is the H-1B visa. Employers can sponsor foreign nationals with at least a bachelors degree to apply for H-1B visas that allow them to live and work in the US for three years, with a possible renewal to six years. Currently, 85,000 such visas can be issued each year. 84% of them go to people from India or China. Maybe a handful of those immigrants really are exceptional Einstein-like talents we’d be foolish to turn away, but probably not all 85,000 of them.

The employer has to affirm that the worker will be appropriately paid and that his or her (mostly his) employment won’t negatively impact similar American workers. In practice, though, these provisions are hard to monitor or enforce. Critics charge that H-1B workers are easily abused, because (if no other employers are waiting in the wings) the employer can expel a worker from the US just by withdrawing sponsorship. So H-1B workers can become cheap-but-highly-trained labor that corporations may prefer to American workers that the company doesn’t hold as much leverage over.

Obviously, the tech barons want to be free to import as many cheap engineers and programmers as they want, while Americans with comparable credentials want H-1B visas limited or eliminated. This conflict goes to the heart of what “America First” really means: Should we be strengthening Team America by bringing in talent wherever we can find it, or should we be defending the livelihoods of individual Americans? (An analogy to bring this home: Imagine you’re a young outfielder for the New York Mets, and that you’ve been struggling for playing time so you can prove yourself. How do you feel about the team signing Juan Soto? Your team is better, so your odds of going to the World Series have improved. But your individual prospects have taken a hit.) TPM:

The two sides began to argue on Sunday, after Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishan, a partner at Andreesen Horowitz, as a White House policy adviser on Artificial Intelligence to work with Sacks, the Trump administration’s crypto and AI czar.

This may seem like a relatively minor White House appointment. However, Krishan has also been a proponent of removing country caps on green cards and H1-B visas, which allow American companies to hire foreign workers for certain specializations.

Nativists like Laura Loomer (who not so long ago was rumored to be having an affair with Trump) found this appointment “deeply disturbing“. Musk and Ramaswamy replied by attacking American workers, with Musk approvingly retweeting a post that described American workers as “retarded”.

Then Musk was attacked back, and responded by taking away privileges on X from people who criticized him. (Remember when Elon was a “free speech absolutist“? It turns out that just applies to Nazis.)

I think Paul Krugman has put his finger on what’s at stake here:

Every political movement is a coalition made up of factions with different goals and priorities. Normally what holds these factions together is realism and a willingness to compromise: Each faction is willing to give the other factions part of what they want in return for part of what it wants.

What’s different about MAGA is that I’m pretty sure that almost all of the movement’s activists (as opposed to the low-information voters who put Trump over the top) knew that he was a con man, without even concepts of a plan to reduce prices. But each faction believed that he was their con man, putting something over on everyone else.

But now the two most important factions — what we might call original MAGA, motivated largely by hostility to immigrants, and tech bro MAGA, seeking a free hand for scams low taxes and deregulation — have gone to war, each apparently fearing that they may themselves have been marks rather than in on the con.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

December 30, 2024 – 8:31 am

The normal thing to do in the last week of the year is to do a year-in-review post, but I find I just can’t. The national story of the year is Donald Trump’s election to a second term, and my personal story is that my wife died at the beginning of December. I’ve been avoiding all the “goodbye to 2024” articles, because there’s just too much to say goodbye to.

Instead, the featured post this week focuses on how the MAGA coalition (which already couldn’t produce a majority vote for Trump) has begun to splinter even before their candidate even takes office. “Cracks in the MAGA Coalition” will cover the dissension between Trump’s working-class voters and his top donor, Elon Musk. (Strange thing: If you’re a working person, the richest man in the world is not your friend.) Also: the difficulties forming a working majority in the House, and the impossible expectations the Trump administration faces going forward. That should be out around 10 EST.

The weekly summary will cover Jimmy Carter’s death at 100; Trump’s aggressive comments against Greenland, Panama, and Canada; the Ethics Committee report on Matt Gaetz; and a few other things before closing with an alternative to New Years resolutions. I’m aiming to post that around noon.

About my wife: Deb was a constant but hidden presence on this blog. She was a sounding board for all the ideas, and frequently called my attention to phrases or metaphors that were unfair or would unintentionally offend some readers. She was my tireless cheerleader, who often encouraged me to take on topics that seemed impossible to cover adequately by the end of the week.

And finally: About a month before she unexpectedly died, the photographer at our godson’s wedding captured an expression that I saw often, but which had never managed to make it into photographs. May you all someday have someone who is still looking at you this way after 40 years.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (37)

Opening Skirmish

December 23, 2024 – 11:10 am

I don’t think markets are properly pricing in the likely inflationary consequences of Trump’s coming war on arithmetic.

– Paul Krugman

There are no featured posts this week.

This week everybody was talking about shutting down the government

It didn’t happen, but it came close, and how it came close has implications for the future.

The federal government was set to run out of money at the stroke of midnight Saturday morning. Congress hasn’t been able to pass an actual set of appropriations bills since Republicans gained “control” of the House two years ago, but the government has kept going via a series of continuing resolutions that keep kicking the can down the road. Basically, a continuing resolution says that spending can continue at current levels for a few more months. Usually, a few additional expenses get added on to a continuing resolution to respond to events unforeseen by the previous appropriations.

This time, the two parties had reached consensus on a new continuing resolution to keep things running until March, and to include extra money for hurricane relief and a few other uncontroversial things. But at the last minute, Trump and Elon Musk convinced Republicans to withdraw their support. It was a typical Trump move: Blow up an agreement by asking for one more thing.

Apparently this tactic worked for him during his business career, when he was dealing with small businessmen who had already delivered their products and foolishly expected to be paid in full. But in government all it has done is delay or completely scuttle deals that benefit both sides: Trump said he would get a better agreement when he scrapped Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and also when he pulled out of the Paris Accords on climate change. But to the best of my knowledge he has never actually closed one of these “better deals” he keeps talking about. (His supporters will claim the revision of NAFTA as a success, but that treaty was due for revision anyway, and the concessions from Mexico and Canada were almost entirely issues that Obama had already worked out as part of the TransPacific Partnership, another agreement Trump nixed. If Trump’s trade war with China accomplished anything, I was never able to identify what it was.)

Anyway, the one-more-thing Trump wanted this time was to eliminate the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a limit on how much debt the US government can issue. Currently, the Treasury is actually over the limit by about $5 trillion, but Congress had avoided a self-inflicted economic disaster by suspending the debt limit until January 1. So in a few weeks the Treasury will find itself doing tricks to avoid default, unless Congress can pass something.

I have strong feelings both ways on eliminating the debt ceiling. On the one hand, the ceiling is stupid, and other nations don’t have one for a simple reason: It can create situations where all options violate the law. (Congress has ordered the government to spend money, but not authorized any method of raising that money.) It’s not that I’m for unlimited debt, but the place to control borrowing is through the annual budget process. Once a deficit budget is approved, the government should be authorized to borrow money to cover it.

The need to keep raising the debt limit has created a series of artificial crises: Even if nothing is wrong with the actual economy, an economic disaster will ensue unless Congress acts to untangle its own knots. For the last two decades the debt limit has been a self-destruct button that Republican terrorists in Congress repeatedly threatened to push. Eliminating it would be a good thing.

On the other hand, though, after so many years of shenanigans, I don’t think Republicans should now be allowed to say, “Oh, never mind”, or to posture against unlimited debt while Democrats take the blame. I want an apology for all these past crises. I want an admission that they need to raise or circumvent the debt limit because they actually have no viable plan to control the deficit, and they foresee budget deficits extending into the years when they have unified control over the government.

If they’re actually as worried about debt as they always claim to be, they can pass unpopular tax increases or spending cuts.

Republicans may spout all kinds of nonsense about how their tax cuts will pay for themselves through higher growth — which no past tax cut ever has done. And they can fantasize about huge spending cuts that only target “waste, fraud, and abuse” without causing harm to any real American households. But when it comes time to collect money and pay it out, accounting ledgers refuse to be fooled: Something will have to cover the gap between revenue and spending.

But Trump had made his demand, so House Republicans had to respond. Speaker Johnson put together a new continuing resolution that essentially just added a two-year debt ceiling suspension to the previous deal. It failed. Two Democrats voted for it, but 38 Republicans voted against it. Then the House put together a bill more-or-less the same as the one Trump and Musk rejected, and it passed.

and what this vote portends for the new Congress

Ever since Barack Obama’s landslide election in 2008, the GOP has been the Party of No. What unites them is opposition to what Democrats want — healthcare for all, equal rights for women and minorities, the rule of law, and taking action against climate change and mass shootings, for example. But for any issue other than cutting rich people’s taxes, they struggle to get to Yes. Even during Trump’s first term, their attempt to repeal ObamaCare — a position they’d been running on for years — failed because they couldn’t agree on a replacement plan.

The vote on the continuing resolutions was similar. Trump could demand that Republicans reject the deal on the table, but he couldn’t get them to approve the resolution he wanted.

It will be interesting to see if the House will be able to function at all when the new Congress starts in January. Will Republicans be able to return Speaker Johnson to the gavel? Or agree on any speaker? What happens if they haven’t resolved that question by January 6, when they’re constitutionally obligated to count the electoral votes and announce the new president?

Going forward, Republicans in Congress will need to unite around a plan to circumvent the debt ceiling and fund the government past March. Then Trump will have an FY 2026 budget proposal. That budget will have to solidify the vague posturing he did in the 2024 campaign and is still doing. It either will or won’t implement sweeping spending cuts like the ones Musk keeps talking about. It will or won’t include billions to build the concentration camps his mass deportation plans will require. It will or won’t repeal ObamaCare or cut Social Security benefits or eliminate the Department of Education.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump created a fog of uncertainty around his plans that journalists never bothered to dispel. He will deport 10-20 million immigrants, but only the criminal ones. He will raise tariffs, deport cheap labor, and still bring down inflation. He’ll massively cut government spending without touching the programs that any particular voter cares about. And so on.

But budgets are not foggy. They fund some things but not others. They tax some things but not others. The number on the bottom line is either positive or negative.

This is the beginning of what I talked about last week: Until Trump actually takes power, he can be all things to all people. He can just claim that America is going to be great again, that all our problems will disappear, and that only bad people will be hurt by his policies. But governing involves choices, and the choices he makes will disappoint many of his voters. What those disappointments are will dictate how Democrats run against him in 2026 and 2028.

I’m late noticing this, but Paul Krugman did a good job of taking down the “waste, fraud, and abuse” claims of Musk and the other would-be budget-cutters. We’ve seen these government “efficiency” commissions before, usually better staffed and more serious that DOGE appears to be.

There is, of course, inefficiency and waste in the federal government, as there is in any large organization. But most government spending happens because it delivers something people want, and you can’t make significant cuts without hard choices.

Furthermore, the notion that businessmen have skills that readily translate into managing the government is all wrong. Business and government serve different purposes and require different mindsets.

I think Krugman has come up with a good label for the kinds of cuts the DOGE barons keep talking about: doing Willie Sutton in reverse. Sutton was the mid-20th-century thief who famously answered a question about why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.“

What’s fundamentally unserious about Musk and his partner Vivek Ramaswamy is that they keep targeting places the money isn’t, like foreign aid or federal payrolls. Cutting all foreign aid (including the money that goes to countries you like) and firing all government employees (including the ones you rely on) would not make a serious dent in the deficit.

If you want to cut government spending in any significant way, you have to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or Defense. Defense is its own discussion, but the other three are very low-overhead programs, so the only significant cuts would be cuts to benefits.

and Trump’s media strategy

If Trump is going to succeed in his plan to turn America into a fake democracy like Orban’s Hungary, he’ll need a complacent media to keep the public complacent. His plans to achieve that are taking shape.

Fundamentally, American media is split into two parts:

  • News organizations that are part of giant corporations like CNN (Warner Brothers Discovery) or MSNBC (NBC Universal).
  • Stand-alone organizations like The Guardian or Pro Publica.

The Washington Post appears to stand alone, but its owner (Jeff Bezos) is also a major shareholder in Amazon. We’ll get to The New York Times in a minute.

Trump’s media-domination strategy is similarly twofold: The weakness of the conglomerate-owned sites is that their parent organizations are susceptible to government bribery or intimidation. Amazon, for example, either will or won’t receive government contracts, and could be threatened with antitrust enforcement or profit-killing regulations. In court, it would be hard to connect those bribes and threats to specific news stories, and so their effect on the freedom of the press would be deniable.

The stand-alone organizations, on the other hand, don’t have the deep pockets of a major corporation behind them, so they can be exhausted by frivolous litigation. We can see the beginnings of this already in Trump’s suit against The Des Moines Register for a pre-election poll that (erroneously) showed Trump trailing in Iowa.

Matt Bai:

If bad polls put you in legal jeopardy, there wouldn’t be a newspaper left in America, which might be the goal. There is something truly diabolical, but also very smart, about trying to spend the media into submission at this moment. It’s un-American, but it might also work.

The Register is owned by Gannett, and so is not a perfect example. But it’s easy to imagine how this strategy could unfold: Nearly every expose’ by Pro Publica could be result in a defamation suit. All the suits would be baseless, but who would cover the legal bills to defeat them?

That leaves us with The New York Times, which is large enough to field a team of lawyers, but is also a stand-alone corporation. But in view of its sorry performance in covering the 2024 campaign, Trump may not need any nefarious way to keep the NYT in check.

and the Constitution

Trumpists are already floating the third-term idea, putting out the idea that the limit is only on consecutive terms. Just so you know, here’s what the 22nd Amendment says:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

So there’s nothing difficult to interpret here. Nothing ambiguous, nothing about consecutive terms. It’s no third term, period. If Trump is president beyond January 20, 2029, the Constitution has been violated.

Another Constitution-busting idea we’re going to hear a lot about is eliminating birthright citizenship. Here’s what the 14th Amendment says:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Trump keeps saying he can end birthright citizenship by executive action. If he tries to follow through on that, we’ll have to count on the Supreme Court to decide whether the Constitution still means anything.

and you also might be interested in …

Remember the uproar over “Defund the Police”? The slogan was a political loser, but the thinking behind it is catching on. The idea is that local governments should have emergency responders with a variety of skills, and that armed police officers may not be the best people to send to every disturbance.

Well, Oklahoma City is reporting that its police department has seen a 57% drop in mental-health-related emergency calls in the past year. The reason? The city has a 988 hotline that connects people to mental-health specialists rather than police. 988 calls have sharply increased over the same period of time.

The Montana Supreme Court has agreed with a group of local teen-agers that the Montana Constitution’s promise of “a clean and healthful environment” applies to climate change. It will be interesting to see what the specific implications of this ruling are.

I’m really enjoying Paul Krugman’s post-NYT Substack blog. More and more it looks like the imprimatur of the august New York Times has been baggage that slowed Paul down.

In this column, he explains why “Health Insurance is a Racket“. The money for Americans’ healthcare coverage overwhelmingly depends on the government, whether we’re talking about direct government programs like Medicare and Medicaid or employer-sponsored programs that are motivated by tax breaks. A lot of that money passes through private health insurance companies, and they rake off a chunk of it. But what value do they really add to the process?

Paul also explains why he hasn’t supported Medicare for All proposals: They make economic sense, but they’re political losers. Most Americans covered by employer-sponsored programs report that they are happy with their coverage. So:

anyone proposing a radical reform like Medicare for all is in effect saying to large numbers of voters, “We’re going to take away insurance that you like, that you believe works for you, and replace it with something different. It will be better! Trust us!”

Still, though, even people who aren’t running on MfA proposals should be pointing out that our current system makes no sense. Something different really would be better.

To no one’s surprise, making sports betting legal and advertising it relentlessly during televised sporting events has worsened the nation’s gambling addiction problem.

According to the New York Post, Jeff Bezos is planning to spend $600 million on his second wedding. This is Gilded Age stuff.

Elon Musk isn’t just pushing fascism in the US, but in Germany as well.

Elon Musk has caused outrage in Berlin after appearing to endorse the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland.

Musk, who has been named by Donald Trump to co-lead a commission aimed at reducing the size of the US federal government, wrote on his social media platform X: “Only the AfD can save Germany.”

Senator Dick Durbin interviews NCAA President (and former Republican Governor) Charlie Baker. Number of athletes competing in NCAA schools: 510,000. Number of those athletes known to be trans: 10.

That’s what the panic has been about: 10 people out of 510,000. And I wonder: Do any of those 10 really qualify as unfair competition?

All my life I’ve been reading articles promising that the long-term solution to the world’s energy problem is nuclear fusion. Well, maybe the long term is finally starting to get shorter.

Overall, it’s been a crappy year. But at least we beat the murder hornets.

and let’s close with something Christmasy

Dog owners in London put on an annual dog-centered nativity play. The little guy pictured above is playing an angel.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

December 23, 2024 – 8:45 am

Due to scheduling conflicts among the people I typically spend the holidays with, this last weekend was my Christmas. The festivities didn’t lend themselves to extensive news-sifting, so there won’t be a featured post this week. I’m constructing a weekly summary, which I hope to post between 10 and 11 EST.

The big thing to cover this week is something that didn’t happen: the government shutdown that was due to start Saturday morning. Trump tried his usual one-more-demand negotiating style. That was enough to scuttle a deal otherwise ready to go, but the slim GOP House majority couldn’t hold together to give him anything beyond what it had already negotiated. Sensible people then prevailed, and the deal that passed is very close to the original one.

This was a preview of what I think we’ll soon see: An even-smaller GOP House majority in the new Congress will need to stay united to pass anything, and that will be a tall order. Democrats won’t come to the rescue unless they get something in return, which Trump will hate.

Anyway, I’ll interpret what I think this portends, while noting a few other things: As predicted, Trumpists have already started talking about a third Trump term, in spite of the clear language of the 22nd Amendment. They’re also preparing to challenge birthright citizenship, in spite of the clear language of th 14th Amendment. During the next four years, the Supreme Court will be challenged again and again about whether the Constitution actually means anything in the new fascist era. We should also see pretty quickly whether press freedom survives an era in which the major news outlets are controlled by conglomerates that can be bribed or intimidated by government influence over their non-news business interests.

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Solutions

December 16, 2024 – 12:11 pm

Murder is never the answer. Murder is not a healthy response to corruption. But it is healthy for people to fear that if they kill people for greed, they will be unsafe. … [T]he assassination of Brian Thompson is a wake-up call, a warning that if we don’t solve this problem politically, we may not have a choice about whether it’s solved with violence.

– Cory Doctorow

This week’s featured post is “The ball is in Trump’s court“.

This week everybody was talking about the guy who killed the guy who killed people

On December 4, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down on the street in Manhattan. When I wrote last week, a manhunt for the killer was underway. It was probably a far more extensive manhunt than would happen if you or I were murdered, because this is America and some lives are valued above others. The Black Lives Matter movement has called attention to one end of that spectrum. This is the other end.

Wednesday police caught the guy the were looking for. The arrested suspect is Luigi Mangione. He left a short note explaining the attack, which I have not been able to find a full text of. The Economist reports:

What could have inspired the killing? Mr Mangione’s short note suggested a calculating desire to wreak revenge on America’s health-care system. America, he correctly noted, has the most expensive health care in the world, but life expectancy has stagnated. “Many have illuminated the corruption and greed” in the system, he wrote. “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

UNH’s pushback against the support received by the shooter hasn’t gone very well. An in-house video distributed to UNH employees leaked to the internet, and was scorched by comments from people whose lives have been affected by denied claims.

The most insightful commentary I’ve seen on this situation is by Cory Doctorow, who published a short story with a similar theme (people killing executives of companies that had harmed them) several years ago. So he had been thinking about this for a long time before it actually happened. He puts his finger on precisely why so many Americans hate health insurance companies in general and UNH in particular (because it is the worst of the lot): They routinely kill people for money.

Doctorow goes through UNH branch by branch and explains how each one kills people for money. And he expresses his general amazement not that the Thompson assassination happened, but that such killings don’t happen more often.

I don’t want people to kill insurance executives, and I don’t want insurance executives to kill people. But I am unsurprised that this happened. Indeed, I’m surprised that it took so long. It should not be controversial to note that if you run an institution that makes people furious, they will eventually become furious with you.

America is a place swimming in guns. Disgruntled Americans routinely shoot up venues that symbolize their unhappiness and despair: workplaces, schools, and so on. Why has it taken them so long to get to health insurance executives whose policies kill their loved ones?

The Buddhist corner of my brain reminds me that Thompson was a human being, and that all human beings deserve compassion. He undoubtedly had loved ones who will miss him dearly, and they deserve compassion too. But you know, the list of people deserving my compassion is long right now, and I don’t think I’ll get to Thompson or his family for quite a while. In the meantime, his heirs should take satisfaction in the millions of dollars he made by killing people.

I also suspect that Luigi Mangione will turn out to be no hero. But in some sense that doesn’t matter.

Here’s a quote I heard years ago and never traced to its source: Good karma is cost effective. That’s a further point Doctorow makes in different words. Maybe executives could spend less on guards and panic rooms if they gave people less reason to want to do them violence. Maybe corporations could spend less on public relations if they didn’t raise so much legitimate public hatred. Maybe executives could live freer happier lives with less money if they stopped being such monsters.

Adam Parkhomenko:

When right-wing scum tried to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, Republicans made excuses.

When a lunatic beat Paul Pelosi with a hammer, they made jokes.

And when Trump sent a mob to attack the Capitol, they made up lies.

Don’t lecture us about condemning violence.

Meanwhile, Trump and Vance took newly acquitted killer Daniel Perry to the Army-Navy game.

and bowing to the new overlord

There’s some debate over whether Senator Ernst is folding her opposition to Pete Hegseth or just temporizing until the FBI either validates the accusations against him or clears him. “I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources.” is only an endorsement if the truth favors Hegseth.

Meanwhile, retired priest Father Nathan Monk analyzes Hegseth’s controversial tattoos. J. D. Vance has tried to spin the reaction against those tattoos as anti-Christian bias, but Monk disagrees.

Alt-right accounts often utilize Crusader memes as ways to threaten violence without explicitly stating it. This has resulted in a resurgence of the use of symbols associated with the Crusades by Christian Nationalist groups, including the Crusader’s Cross and the phrase Deus Vult. … If [Hegseth] were a Roman Catholic, I think it would be hard to place him in the hate speech category, because there is a complicated history with the Jerusalem cross. It might have been a symbol he was accustomed to or had some major significance. However, that is not the case. These are not symbols of his Protestant upbringing or linked to any history or heritage, past or present, but symbols of the Crusaders that are heavily being used by Christian Nationalists to promote violence and hatred. …

This isn’t a case of his faith being called into question but his beliefs of supremacy, superiority, and sovereignty being actively called out by other Christians who are tired of the Prince of Peace yet again being used as a weapon of war against the very types of people Jesus called us to love.

ABC settled a defamation suit with Trump, which they probably would have won. At the very least, Trump would have been deposed under oath, which I’m sure he was anxious to avoid. In the settlement, ABC will pay $15 million to a “presidential foundation and museum”, pay another million for Trump’s attorney fees, and issue an apology.

Knowing the history of Trump and charities, I expect a big chunk of the $15 million to wind up in his pocket.

Michelle Goldberg:

I’m trying to put my finger on what’s happening with this great capitulation to Trump — ABC News, Chris Wray, the Democrats signing up to work with DOGE, Mark Benioff, etc. It’s like you can feel the air going out of an entire social order.

Big tech companies lined up to give $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund.

His 2017 inauguration was rife with corruption, ultimately resulting in a $750K settlement with the DC attorney general.

This is one small step in the Orbanization of America:

Yesterday I pulled overt references of queerness off my site, my very successful store that sells my books that have queer main characters. Because a few days ago, Meta emailed saying my advertising on their platform will be restricted – my site was categorized as “sexuality and gender identity.”

I don’t necessarily blame Novae Caelum for doing this, because this is the new world: If you want stay in business, even the business of writing novels with queer characters, you need to trim your sails a little. Stories like this won’t ever rise to the mass media’s attention, but there will be thousands of them.

and you also might be interested in …

A heartbreaking story in yesterday’s NYT: Jaime Cachua is a 33-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant who came to Rome, Georgia before his first birthday. He has no memories of Mexico, is not in contact with any relatives there, and speaks Spanish badly. He is married to an American citizen and they have 7-year-old twins who are citizens because they were born here. By all accounts, he is a productive member of a small-town society.

He’d lived all but the first year of his life in Rome, a riverside town of 40,000 in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. He was a customer service specialist at the local car dealership, a worship team volunteer at church and the host of family barbecues in his neighborhood cul-de-sac.

But Rome is Trump territory, and if Trump keeps his promises, Jaime will be deported to a country where he knows no one. Rome is represented in Congress by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who says she can’t wait for the mass deportations to start. Jaime’s closest friends, even Sky, the man who considers Jaime a surrogate son, voted for Trump.

Jaime’s conversations with Sky are surreal in the way that so many conversations with Trump supporters are: Sky simply doesn’t believe that what is happening is happening. Trump just wants to deport all the bad Mexicans, and Jaime is a good Mexican. Of course he’ll be fine. Sky never explains how he thinks millions of people can be deported “very quickly” while paying close attention to the nuances of each case.

Another situation where the implementation details will matter is the 1-6 pardons Trump keeps promising. Are we talking about people who got swept up in the crowd and walked through doors already broken down? Or about the people who broke those doors? Or the people who battled police to get into a position to break down the doors? What about planners like Enrique Tarrio or Stewart Rhodes, who were convicted of seditious conspiracy?

It’s important to remind people that none of the 1-6 convicts were sent to jail for supporting Trump, which has never been a crime and shouldn’t be. They were convicted of breaking specific laws.

Similarly, they weren’t convicted by the media or by Democrats. They were convicted by juries of their peers, who heard evidence from both sides and unanimously decided that they were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

South Korea failed in its first attempt to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, who briefly declared martial law two weeks ago, but Saturday they got it done. 12 members of Yoon’s party flipped against him, and that was enough for the needed 2/3 majority of the Parliament.

The spotlight will now move to the country’s constitutional court, whose six justices must vote unanimously in favor to uphold parliament’s decision. Yoon will now be suspended from office while the court deliberates. It has 180 days to rule on Yoon’s future. If it approves the motion, South Koreans must elect a new president within 60 days of its ruling.

A new government is forming in Syria, after the previous tyrant escaped to Moscow. NBC News analyzes “How Syria’s Bashar al-Assad fell so quickly“. It will be a while before we really know what to think. Many Americans were optimistic back when Fidel Castro overthrew Cuba’s previous tyrant or the ayatollahs replaced Iran’s Shah.

Paul Krugman has retired from his NYT column, but he has shifted his energy to a Substack blog “Paul Krugman wonks out“, which is more focused on his specialty, economics. In this post from Friday, he points out that Trump’s desire for both a trade surplus and foreign capital coming to America violates arithmetic. The number of dollars in foreign hands is finite (i.e. dollars can only be created by the Fed in the US), and foreigners can either buy US products with their dollars or invest them in US assets. They can’t do both with the same dollars.

President Macron has appointed a new French prime minister, Francois Bayrou, following a vote of no confidence in the previous government. Bayrou has a deep hole to dig himself out of. He first needs to assemble a new cabinet that draws majority support in the French Parliament, and then get a new budget passed.

and let’s close with something big

Lots of people have advent calendars this time of year. But nobody has one as big as Gengenbach in Germany.

The Bible tells the story of Jesus’ birth, and many elements of traditional Christmas celebrations originate there: a manger scene, wise men, shepherds, angels, and so on. But nothing in the Bible anticipates Christmas as a holiday, let alone one with gatherings of the extended family and huge feasts. (Mary and Joseph spent the first Christmas in a stable far away from their relatives. I doubt they ate well.)

In particular, the Christmas-anticipating season of Advent is wholly non-Biblical. It seems to have originated in Europe in the fourth century. Advent calendars first appeared in the 19th century in Germany. They were still catching on in the US when President Eisenhower was shown opening one with his grandchildren in 1953. The first chocolate-filled Advent calendars appeared in the 1950s.

But Germany still does it best: Every year, the town of Gengenbach turns its entire town hall into a giant Advent calendar.

Every evening, they raise the shade of another window to reveal a new picture behind it, just as the owner of an Advent calendar unfolds a flap to procure a candy — or these days, a lipstick or a spice sachet.

“It’s quite spectacular because everything gets dark and then we have a spot on the window and then it’s like a little bit of a curtain that goes up,” said Michael Foell of Gengenbach’s tourism bureau. “Everyone is just watching with big eyes and mouths open.”

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The ball is in Trump’s court

December 16, 2024 – 9:32 am

Democrats can’t resist Trump until he starts doing things.

In a Perry Bacon article I linked to two weeks ago, he cautioned against “turning into an amateur political strategist”. It’s a tough temptation to resist, and I’ve been in several conversations recently that veered into who the Democrats’ 2028 nominee should be, what groups of voters we should be trying to win over, how our message needs to change, and so on.

If you find your mind heading in that direction, all I can say is “Slow down.” The election of 2028 or even 2026 will be fought on a battlefield that doesn’t exist yet.

I think the place for political thinking to start is with one obvious fact: The Trumpists won in 2024. They got the White House and both houses of Congress. They control the Supreme Court to an extent that no partisan faction has in my lifetime. And I draw one major conclusion from those facts: The ball is in their court. We can’t know precisely what they’ll do with it until they start doing things. The things they do and the consequences of those actions will shape the landscape of 2026 and 2028.

Trump has raised many hopes and expectations among the people who voted for him. Specifically:

  • The economy is going to be fabulous. Not only will inflation stop, but prices will go back down to what they were the last time Trump was president. The trade deficit will vanish: Americans will get good jobs making the products we no longer import, but other Americans won’t lose their jobs making products for export. Increased oil and gas production will make energy much cheaper, lowering the price of everything. But we won’t have to worry about increased disasters from climate change.
  • Trump will wield unchecked power without abusing it. Neither Congress nor the courts nor the states will be able to stand in his way. But he won’t be petty and go after political opponents who broke no laws. He won’t make Americans afraid to criticize him. He won’t govern for his own profit. He won’t alter the rules to make future Democratic victories impossible. And he won’t ignore the Constitution to seek a third term.
  • The government is going to get drastically smaller. Spending will go way down without cutting Social Security or Medicare or defense. Regulations will be slashed without unleashing bad behavior from predatory corporations. Taxes will go down, but the budget deficit will vanish. Corruption will disappear. Private companies and the free market will serve Americans’ interests better and more efficiently than big government programs like ObamaCare or Medicare for All.
  • American strength will make the world safer. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East will end on terms favorable to US interests. Terrorism will stop. Tariffs will be an unanswerable weapon that makes other countries do what we want.
  • The immigration problem will be solved. The Army will round up 10-20 million undocumented nonwhite people living here, without terrorizing the rest of us. They will be held in camps until they can be deported to other countries, who will accept them for fear of American tariffs. That roundup and detention power will be wielded without abuse, and only the bad, criminal immigrants will be affected. The good Latinos will stay and the bad ones will get kicked out. American industries (like agriculture) won’t be affected by the sudden departure of their work force.
  • Normal (i.e., White, Christian, straight) Americans will matter again. Small towns and rural areas will make a comeback. Working people will get a fair shake and won’t be exploited by giant unregulated corporations, so unions and consumer-protection agencies won’t be needed.

And more. Now, I think the picture I just painted is a fairy tale, because many of those goals are contradictory and most of the rest are unlikely. But just for a moment, let’s imagine Trump fulfills all of it. The people who voted for him look at the results and say, “That’s what I voted for.” The people who didn’t vote for him have to admit (if we are honest) that our fears were groundless. How do the Democrats surge in 2026 and 2028 to regain power?

It’s simple: They don’t. And more than that, they shouldn’t. If the MAGA movement can do all that, it will deserve to stay in power. Gavin Newsom (or whoever you’re picturing) won’t be able to run against it. No “message” you can come up with will win over Hispanics or suburban women or demoralized nonvoters or whichever other group you attribute our 2024 loss to.

What that means in practice is that, while we continue to espouse our own values, and oppose nominees and proposals that look wrong to us, it’s way too soon to start shaping any sort of campaign. A large chunk of the 2026 and 2028 campaigns will necessarily be reactive. Trump will disappoint many of the people who voted for him, either by not doing what he said he would do (“build the wall” from his first administration) or by doing it and having it turn out differently than he said it would. Future Democratic campaigns will center on exploiting that disappointment.

But we can’t design those campaigns until we see who he disappoints and how.

So what does that mean Democrats should be doing now? Laying the groundwork for the Trump-disappointed-you campaign, whatever it turns out to be. We need to constantly call attention to the ways Trump tries to move the goalposts. (Bringing prices down, we now learn from him, is very hard.) We need to highlight those people who are being harmed by his policies, once those policies start to take shape.

The upcoming leadership battle in the House will be the first substantive thing to look at. For the first time in decades, all committee chairs will be White men.

The budget will be a target-rich environment, because Republican math just doesn’t work. Either their cuts won’t total up the way they anticipated, or they will cut things they said they wouldn’t. Probably both. And if there’s a deficit, they own it.

I know that vision is not nearly as inspiring as a ten-point-plan to elect AOC. But this is the reality we have arrived in: The voters have given MAGA a chance to prove itself. We won’t know how to run against them until we see how they fail that test.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

December 16, 2024 – 8:54 am

I can’t start this week’s Teaser without talking about last week’s, which has drawn 124 comments so far, almost all of which were supportive and compassionate. Many of them began something like “We’ve never met, but …” and then went on to say something about what role the Sift plays in their lives.

I honestly didn’t know that many people read the Teasers. I view Teaser-readers as the inner circle of Sift readers. They’re not coming to this blog because somebody told them about a particular article, they show up to find out what I’m going to do this week. That’s why I’m chattier and more personal in the Teasers.

I process by writing, so eventually I’ll have to say something about grief in general and mine in particular, the way C. S. Lewis did. Probably that will show up on my religious/philosophical blog Free and Responsible Search, but I’ll link to it here. (Coincidentally, the post currently on the top of that blog, which I wrote without suspecting my wife would die a few weeks later, tells you a lot about our relationship.) Writing Deb’s obituary was cathartic in its own way. All along, I had been the household PR person who kept our friends informed during her various illnesses, and this was one last chance to play that role.

Anyway, I was touched by the wave of affection in the comments. The people in my flesh-and-blood community have also been tremendous, and I am being very well supported.

But the world keeps spinning: This week’s featured post is about Democrats not getting ahead of ourselves. “The ball is in Trump’s court” revolves around the idea that Trump has raised expectations he can’t fulfill, and that we won’t know how to run against MAGA candidates in 2026 and 2028 until we know how those expectations fail. So it’s way too soon to talk about candidates and campaign themes. It should post maybe 9:30 EST.

The weekly summary will cover the ongoing public discussion about the CEO assassination and the killer, who has been caught. Also, the signs of powerful people bending their knees to Trump, updates on the turmoil in several foreign countries, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon, but it might slip.

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Promises

December 9, 2024 – 11:49 am

“I’ll quit drinking if you let me run the Pentagon” is the most alcoholic thing anybody has ever said.

– frequent social media comment

This week’s featured post is: “The Power of ‘Again’“.

This week everybody was talking about instability abroad

The 54-year regime of the Assad family in Syria is no more, and Assad himself is in Moscow. The main victorious rebel group used to be part of al Qaeda, so they may not be the good guys either.

The general situation — which I imagine she hopes also applies to Putin’s government in Russia — was well described by Kira Rudik of the Ukrainian Parliament:

First, regimes fall very slowly, and nobody believe they are collapsing. And then, regimes fall fast.

Speaking of fast, Tuesday night South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, but Koreans who went to bed early slept through the whole thing. He made his announcement about 10:30 p.m. and reversed course by 4 a.m.

Yoon’s declaration looked like a typical coup announcement:

The decree banned all political activities and limited media freedom. It was the first use of such emergency powers since the country’s military dictatorship fell in the late 1980s.

But it didn’t last.

The counter-reaction came swiftly. Thousands of protesters took to the streets chanting “Arrest him!” The mood was one of outrage mixed with utter shock. … Political opposition to Mr Yoon mobilised throughout the night. The DP called the president’s declaration “essentially a coup”. Han Dong-hoon, the head of Mr Yoon’s own People’s Power Party (PPP) came out against the move. As heavily armed troops stormed the parliament, the 190 lawmakers who had barricaded themselves inside the chamber, a majority of the 300-strong body, voted unanimously to revoke the president’s decree just two hours after it took effect. The armed forces began to leave shortly afterwards.

Saturday, a vote to impeach Yoon failed. Impeachment requires a 2/3 vote, and the opposition party has only 192 of the 300 seats. Ruling when that large a majority wants you gone doesn’t seem like a stable situation, but Im not sure where it goes from here.

Wednesday, the French Parliament passed a motion of no confidence in the government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier after only 12 weeks. It is a political blow to President Macron, who will need to nominate a new prime minister acceptable to the Assembly.

and the plutocracy

Wednesday the CEO of United Healthcare was gunned down in the center of Manhattan while walking across the street from his hotel to another hotel where he was scheduled to address an investors’ conference.

The attack looks planned, but police haven’t caught the guy or publicly identified him yet, so any speculation about his motive is necessarily shaky. (Though apparently the bullets had words written on them: “delay”, “deny”, and “depose”, which apparently have denial-of-coverage associations.) But I will note this, which I can observe on my own social media feed: There’s remarkably little sympathy for the CEO.

UNH is the health insurance company that denies the most claims, by a wide margin. If the assassin turns out to be someone who lost a loved one because UNH wouldn’t pay for care, he’s going to become a hero to some substantial segment of the population. I’m reminded of how during the Depression bank robber John Dillinger became “a folk hero to Americans disillusioned with failing banks and the ineffective federal government”.

As Maureen Tkacik notes at The American Prospect:

Only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO.

The article goes on to describe Medicare Advantage — the privatized part of Medicare — as “ensconced in fraud”.

UnitedHealth, which insures close to a third of the nation’s MA patients, is to a great extent the architect of this vast privatization project, which has in recent years become the undisputed profit center of both the insurance giant and the American health care industry generally. … UnitedHealth has been a particular trailblazer in the art of managing “risk” by simply denying claims for treatments and procedures it unilaterally deems unnecessary.

Princeton sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci writes in the NYT:

I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.

She also makes an extended comparison between the present and another era of US history marked by an extreme gap between rich and poor, as well as a surge in political violence: the Gilded Age.

In his blog The ReFrame, A. R. Moxon contrasts the response to CEO Bryan Thompson’s murder to the death of Jordan Neely, a homeless man strangled on the New York subway. He notes how violent death is discussed differently when the victim is prominent.

Everyone involved in both stories is a human being, unless you ask our society—the parts of it where power is negotiated and narratives of permission are generated, anyway. In the corridors of power, the halls of justice, on platforms of influence, some people in our society are clearly deemed to be human beings— their lives justified, their potential valuable, their deaths tragedies—while others are deemed to be nothing more than a danger, a drain, a discomfort, a problem to be solved by making them not exist quite so much. The primary dividing line appears to be whether you’ve got money, or, failing that, whether you can make somebody money.

I am neither advocating terrorism nor planning any myself, but the Powers That Be need to recognize how consistently they’ve been shutting down nonviolent paths towards justice. (Trump’s election, and the subsequent demise of any consequences for his law-breaking, is not the main reason, but it puts the cherry on the sundae.) As JFK said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Meanwhile, how did Elon Musk get into a position to slash your Social Security? Simple: He bought his way in.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the final months of this year’s election to help Donald J. Trump win the presidency, federal filings revealed on Thursday.

That’s just the raw total of dollars Musk spent to boost Trump. It doesn’t count the in-kind contribution of his X/Twitter platform which he turned into a propaganda arm of the Trump campaign.

Axios makes the case the Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter — which has become a disaster according to the ordinary way corporate takeovers are judged — is actually paying off for him, due to the political power it has allowed him to accumulate, particularly if he can use that power to boost his other businesses. But if you are one of the unfortunate investors who went in with him, looking to grow the value of Twitter, too bad for you.

This is a pattern we see all too often: The Right makes false claims against liberal institutions and individuals in order to justify doing those very things when they’re in a position to do so. Biden was not elected via some conspiracy of Facebook, Twitter, and various Soros-funded organizations in 2020, as Trump often claimed. But through X and his vast political spending, Musk definitely put a thumb on the electoral scale in 2024.

Jay Kuo discusses the unethical campaign tactics Musk funded, including false-positive ads, where Muslims would be micro-targeted for an ad that appeared to be for Jews, praising Kamala Harris for her Zionism, while Jews were micro-targeted with ads that appeared to be for Muslims and praised her willingness to cut off arms shipments to Israel.

This tactic goes back at least to Edwin O’Connor’s classic political novel The Last Hurrah published in 1956. In it, old Boston pols reminisce about the old days, when you might send a fake Catholic priest to canvass for your opponent in a Protestant neighborhood.

Owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is doing his best to ruin The Los Angeles Times. He intervened during the campaign to stop his newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris and running a series criticizing Trump. His most recent idea is to incorporate an AI bias-meter into news stories, with the idea of making the paper more “fair and balanced“. His “combative” interview with Oliver Darcy gives us an indication of what that might mean.

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, believes it is an “opinion,” not a matter of fact, that Donald Trump lies at a higher rate than most other politicians.

“A lot of politicians lie a lot,” Soon-Shiong declared to me on the phone Tuesday evening, pushing back against the assertion that Trump is an abnormality in American politics.

In his explanation of why he has resigned from the LAT, Senior Legal Columnist Harry Litman (who I know as a contributor to MSNBC) takes a different view:

[T]he idea of balance is fundamentally misplaced when on one side of the balance is a sociopathic liar like Donald Trump. … In that context, the bromide of just being balanced is a terrible dereliction of journalists’ first defining responsibility of reporting the truth. Soon-Shiong apparently would have the Times deliver an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand presentation to readers. But there is no “other hand.” Trump is an inveterate liar, and journalists have a defining responsibility to call that out.

and the Hunter pardon

When I wrote last week, President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter was fairly recent. But now that I’ve had a chance to read many opinions on it, I feel like I got it right the first time: It would be nice to be able to draw a clear moral line between Biden’s use of pardons and Trump’s, but if I had a son I wouldn’t sacrifice him to achieve that goal.

Hunter has committed a few fairly minor crimes and has already been over-prosecuted for them by a Trump-appointed special prosecutor that Biden left in place. Investigations by partisan House committees repeatedly over-promised what they could prove against Hunter, producing a lot of click-bait headlines in right-wing media, but little else. Four more years of Hunter investigations and/or prosecutions would be a miscarriage of justice.

I don’t see the new administration being restrained by the precedents of past administrations, so I think the impact of Biden restraining his mercy would have been mainly rhetorical. And I’ll make a prediction along those lines: If the GOP needs to break a filibuster to achieve one of its goals — a national abortion ban, say — the fact that Democrats preserved the filibuster when they had the majority will mean nothing.

Here’s the WaPo’s Ann Telnaes’ comment on Speaker Johnson’s double standard:

Meanwhile, Ron Filipkowski:

Virtually every question today at the WH Press briefing was about the Hunter pardon, as if that is the thing the American people care about most right now. The DC press is so disconnected from the American public and serves them poorly more often than not.

and you also might be interested in …

Can you imagine the response if Biden had proposed selling gold out of Fort Knox to bid up the price of his political allies’ products? Well, that’s what the Bitcoin Reserve Bill would do if passed:

Four days later, Sen [Cynthia] Lummis [of Wyoming] introduced to the 118th Congress the “Boosting Innovation, Technology, and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act of 2024”, or BITCOIN Act. The bill mandates that all bitcoin held by any Federal agency be transferred to the Treasury to be held in a strategic bitcoin reserve. In addition, it mandates that the Secretary of the Treasury purchase “not more than 200,000 Bitcoins per year over a 5-year period, for a total acquisition of 1,000,000 Bitcoins.” That 1,000,000 Bitcoins is then to be held by the Treasury for at least 20 years before they can consider selling it

Chris Hayes skewered this idea.

Covid deniers often claim that the pandemic death totals were overstated: Anybody who died with Covid supposedly was counted as dying of Covid, even if they got hit by a truck.

But the officially reported deaths are not the only way to access the death toll. There’s also the demographic concept of excess deaths. Demographers are really good at looking at a population and predicting about how many people will die during normal times. (That’s why life insurance is a reliable business rather than a crapshoot.) When something exceptional happens (like a war, a famine, or an epidemic), people die in greater numbers than demographers would ordinarily expect: In other words, excess deaths.

So that provides a way to check whether a pandemic is real or exaggerated. If doctors are misreporting ordinary deaths as pandemic deaths, then the reported deaths from the disease would be greater than the excess deaths. But in fact it goes the other way. Excess deaths during the pandemic were far higher than reported Covid deaths. So by that measure the Covid pandemic was far more deadly than previously thought.

Atlantic’s Adam Serwer points out something I’ve been noticing also: MAGA wants to make heroes out of villains, or just plainly doesn’t get that characters are villains. Tony Soprano, Walter White, Homelander, Judge Dredd — these are not good people, and they were created as cautionary tales, not as heroes to emulate.

When Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” went to Mar-a-Lago a few weeks ago, I decided not to join the chorus of people calling them out. Maybe they weren’t kissing the ring; I decided to wait and see.

Well, now we’re seeing. They’re bowing down. Wednesday, David Frum appeared on MJ to comment on the Pete Hegseth nomination, which was in trouble because of reports of his drinking — the most recent being reports that colleagues at Fox News had been worried about him. Frum gave a substantive comparison of Hegseth to a failed defense secretary nominee from 1989: John Tower, who was similarly reported to drink excessively. Frum segued into his commentary by quipping “If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.”

After Frum had been excused, Brzezinski came on to apologize to Fox News. Frum responded in The Atlantic:

It is a very ominous thing if our leading forums for discussion of public affairs are already feeling the chill of intimidation and responding with efforts to appease.

Thursday morning, Scarborough began the show with what TV Insider described as a “20 minute rant” and Dan Fromkin called “whiny” and “defensive”, denying that he or the show was afraid of Trump, and defending again the trip to Mar-a-Lago.

Fromkin observed that there is no journalistic reason to have an off-the-record conversation with Trump.

Going off the record with a source is a compact and a sign of respect. You grant a source anonymity on the assumption that you will get valuable information in return. But Trump holds nothing back in public. Nothing he says off the record will be revelatory. Certainly nothing will be revelatory and true. Nothing will suddenly give you a better “read on the man.”

So what is it then? It’s bending the knee. It’s obedience.

and let’s close with something unexpectedly awesome

Just this weekend, I bought tickets for only my second post-Covid airline trip. I went out of my way to get non-stop flights, because getting stuck in airports is not a high-value experience. At least not most of the time.

But then there’s the Jewel at Singapore’s Changi airport, which apparently has become a tourist attraction in itself. Why can’t my country have nice things?

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The Power of “Again”

December 9, 2024 – 10:25 am

Honest journalists can debunk false news stories.
But the responses those false stories raise linger as if they were true.

Something I’ve been struggling with since the election is: Why didn’t Kamala Harris’ message get through?

The majority of Harris-campaign criticism I’ve read is of the form “She should have talked about X instead of Y.” Kitchen-table issues instead of trans rights, centrist issues instead of far-left issues, and so forth. And typically, if you look at the actual content of her speeches and ads, the answer is: “She did, but nobody paid attention.”

Which raises the question: Why not?

One answer (which commenters have repeatedly criticized me for not highlighting) is that she’s a Black woman, so it’s easy for our sexist and racist culture to discount whatever she says. And that’s true up to a point, but I doubt it hits the heart of the matter, because I was already noticing the same problem with the Biden campaign: He never got credit for the jobs created by his infrastructure bill, for example, or for lowering the cost of prescription drugs. You can say, “He should have talked about that.” But when he did, no one listened.

I also think the racism/sexism interpretation suggests a too-easy solution: We can just nominate a White guy like Gavin Newsom next time, and we’ll be fine. But I doubt that’s true.

A related problem is why Trump could tell obvious lies, get debunked, and keep telling those lies with positive effects. Even people who knew the truth continued believe the point the lie was making. I think we need to understand how that works.

The critical relative. I want to propose a theory based on scaling up something you may have observed in your personal life.

Imagine you have a relative who for many years has criticized you in some unfair way: You’re stupid, you’re ugly, you’re selfish, or something like that. Picture a parent, a sibling, or an annoying older cousin who’s been putting you down since you were both kids.

So you go to a family gathering, and as you walk in you hear that relative saying things that sound just like the unfair criticism. Somebody is being stupid, ugly, selfish — and you’re sure it’s you.

But as you walk up ready to give that relative a piece of your mind, something in the conversation makes you realize they’re not talking about you at all. So if you enter the conversation and cut loose, you’ll just make a fool of yourself.

Now think about how you feel: You have no cause for offense. Nobody has insulted you. But do your emotions stand down?

Probably not. Even though the goad that raised those emotions was a complete misperception, nonetheless they have been raised. Most likely, you’ll be spoiling for a fight the rest of the day.

I think that’s what happened in the campaign.

Preexisting narratives. The most powerful propaganda message is “This thing you already know about is happening again.”

What’s insidious about this message is that it’s almost impossible to debunk. Ostensibly it’s a news story: Something supposedly has just happened. So an objective news source might try to debunk it by demonstrating that the “something” in question didn’t happen.

But that doesn’t work because it doesn’t address what’s really being communicated. The “things you already know about” that the news story brought to mind are not explicitly in the story, so they’re not touched by the debunking.

I think this requires an example: the Haitian immigrants who were supposedly “eating the dogs … eating the cats” in Springfield, Ohio. It just flat out wasn’t true, and every piece of “evidence” supporting the story was either made up or repurposed from some other event. (The photo that supposedly showed a Haitian carrying off a dead goose wasn’t of a Haitian, it wasn’t from Springfield, and the guy was clearing roadkill, not returning from a successful goose-hunt.)

So as a news story, eating-dogs-and-cats was completely debunkable. But the debunking didn’t stick: Trump and Vance continued to refer to it long after it had been proven false.

But why didn’t the debunking stick? In this case, the “thing you already know” — at least in TrumpWorld — is that illegal immigrants are threatening your way of life. Haitians eating people’s pets isn’t the beginning of this issue, it’s just more of it. If you’ve been paying attention to Fox News or Truth Social or right-wing podcasts, you’ve heard hundreds of examples of how illegal immigrants are threatening your way of life. This one isn’t strictly true? So what?

To truly debunk the story in the minds of its target audience, you would have to identify what they think they already know and the incidents they think establish their knowledge — and debunk all of them. Obviously, that can’t be done, both because the assignment itself is impossible, and because even if you succeeded, nobody would have the attention span to process everything you’d need to tell them.

Second example: The “trans” Olympic boxer who was beating up women in the Olympics. Again, completely false. The boxer was from Algeria, a Muslim-majority country where trans isn’t recognized as a thing. Imane Khelif’s birth certificate identifies her as a woman, and she’s never been anything else. An Algerian with a male birth certificate who was claiming to be female would most likely be in prison, not on the Olympic team.

All those facts were easily available to anybody who wanted to check.

But so what? You are already supposed to know that men claim to be women so they can cheat in sporting events, and men posing as women put real women in physical danger. Again, the people who believe these things also believe that they’ve seen dozens and dozens of examples — the great majority of which are probably also either objectively false or wildly exaggerated. But what can you, the objective mainstream journalist, do about that? You weren’t there when this base of misleading examples was laid down, and you’re not going to reverse it with one news story.

So even after the claim was known to be false, Trump went on making it, presumably because he believed it was working for him.

The impact of “it’s happening again” is to bring back to mind people’s general impression that this kind of thing happens all the time. And that impression continues to feel fresh even after the particular story turns out to be false.

Or remember when President Biden said Trump voters are “garbage”? He was clearly trying to say that the Trump campaign’s racist rhetoric was garbage, but — surprise! — things Biden tries to say often come out wrong. But never mind that — instantly this became a scandal for Harris, who hadn’t said anything remotely similar.

Think about why: Trump voters already think they know that elite Democrats look down on them. And here it was, happening again. It brought back Hillary’s deplorables remark (which also wasn’t as bad as you probably remember) and countless other moments when Fox News has told them that Democrats were insulting them.

Ambient informaton. The it’s-happening-again phenomenon is related to the problem of ambient information that I talked about three weeks ago.

The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece.

The upshot is that when many people hear some meme like “eating the dogs”, they don’t make a serious attempt to figure out whether or not it refers to something that actually happened. Instead, they’re thinking about whether it “sounds right”. How well does it fit into a pattern with all the other news they’ve rubbed up against?

You can say that people just shouldn’t think this way, but in the meantime we have to deal with a world where many do.

And that seems to require a completely different form of campaigning and a different form of journalism.

In traditional political and journalistic thinking, ethical campaigning and objective journalism go hand-in-hand: Your candidate is right on the issues, you collect the facts and examples that show your candidate is right, the media gives that information preference over conflicting information based on lies, and the public eventually gets the message.

But if things ever really worked that way, they don’t any more, at least not for a number of voters large enough to decide close elections.

And if Democrats can’t figure out how to address this problem, I don’t think nominating a White man or targeting Latinos with more effective ads is going to do the trick.

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