The Weekly Sift

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.

– Joan Didion (1934-2021)

This week’s featured post is “Closing Out a Dismal Year“.

This week everybody was talking about the pandemic

Even for people expecting a Christmas/Omicron surge, the numbers this week have been frightening. The 7-day average for new cases per day in the US rose to 214K, up 83% from levels that were already surging two weeks ago. (The record is 251K on January 11. At the current rate of increase we’ll break it in a few days.)

Hospitalizations (71K, up 8%) and deaths (1328, up 3%) are not rising as fast, but it’s still uncertain whether that is the normal time lag or an indication that Omicron is less dangerous, at least for the vaccinated.

The other ominous thing about the increase is that (like the original Covid infection), it’s concentrated in a few big cities: The national average is 65 new cases per 100K per day, but Miami-Dade County has 276; Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) 262; New York City 231; Washington D.C. 186. As we’ve seen before, a surge that starts in the cities doesn’t stay there. Like fashions, infections in the cities eventually reach the countryside.

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One hopeful possibility is still speculative: Maybe there’s a reason for Omicron to be more contagious but less deadly.

[T]he [Hong Kong] study also found that Omicron is significantly less effective than previous strains at multiplying in the lower-lung tissue. This might suggest a different disease profile for Omicron. Upper-respiratory-tract infections typically cause colds and sore throats, while lower-respiratory infections are more likely to cause pneumonia. The finding might also suggest a mechanism for greater contagiousness: Virus particles in the upper lung region are less likely to cause severe disease but more likely to be expelled when people talk or sing or just breathe.

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The toll on healthcare workers is particularly worrisome.

Many workers who persisted through the first year of the pandemic have departed jobs because of burnout and anxiety. And with the Omicron variant pushing case numbers up dramatically, the caregivers who remain are getting infections, too, straining staff levels in unpredictable ways.

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If you wonder why healthcare workers are throwing in the towel, read this Reddit account that claims to be from a doctor who has practiced for 30 years. (I know there’s no way to verify Reddit posts. You just have to read it and judge its credibility for yourself.)

He says the last straw was being physically assaulted by the wife of a Covid patient who had just died alone, because the family refused to wear the masks that hospital rules required for visitors. The wife blames the doctor for her husband’s death, because he used real anti-Covid medicine rather than hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

“I will never treat a patient again,” the doctor writes.

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Israel has a more aggressive attitude towards vaccines than the US does. Rather than wait for clinical evidence that a fourth shot helps with Omicron, Israeli authorities are going ahead with a recommendation. Israel believes that early booster shots blunted its Delta wave.

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The Covid surge snarled holiday air traffic, as flight crews called in sick.

Globally, airlines have canceled about 5,700 flights on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the day after, according to FlightAware. That includes about 1,700 flights within, into or out of the United States.

and January 6

Merrick Garland’s former professor Laurence Tribe is worried that his former student is not rising to the challenge of the times: holding former president Donald Trump and his top-level co-conspirators accountable for their attempt to keep Trump in power after he lost the election. Writing in the NYT with two former prosecutors, he says:

Based purely on what we know today from news reports and the steady stream of revelations coming from the House select committee investigating the attack, the attorney general has a powerful justification for a robust and forceful investigation into the former president and his inner circle. … And yet there are no signs, at least in media reports, that the attorney general is building a case against these individuals — no interviews with top administration officials, no reports of attempts to persuade the foot soldiers to turn on the people who incited them to violence.

… To decline from the outset to investigate would be appeasement, pure and simple, and appeasing bullies and wrongdoers only encourages more of the same. Without forceful action to hold the wrongdoers to account, we will likely not resist what some retired generals see as a march to another insurrection in 2024 if Mr. Trump or another demagogue loses.

and the new space telescope

The most powerful telescope ever, the James Webb Space Telescope, was launched into space on Christmas.

NASA now faces “30 days of terror” as the telescope travels a million miles out to Lagrange point L2 (the place behind the Earth where terrestrial and solar gravitational fields cancel out orbital acceleration), and unfolds its mirrors and sun shields. Everything has to work: Unlike its predecessor, the Hubble, the Webb will operate well beyond the range of current manned vehicles.

“This telescope is not designed to be a serviceable mission,” Heidi Hammel, an interdisciplinary scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope project, tells Inverse. “So we’re designing it to work, not to send it up and try it.”

After deployment, the Webb will need months of calibration, so we probably won’t see images from it until summer.

But if everything works, the Webb will stretch the bounds of astronomy: It will tell us about the atmospheres of planets in other solar systems (including detecting possible signs of life), and will see light that has been in transit for billions of years — essentially looking into the universe’s distant past.

In the case of cosmology, JWST will be able to detect redder wavelengths than any Great Observatory before it, thereby looking further back in space and time. The proposed COSMOS-Webb project, for example, aims to explore the universe 400,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, back when the first stars were just starting to shine, by examining the same patch of sky as the famous Hubble Deep Fields.

and whether Build Back Better is dead

Last week, Joe Manchin’s announcement that he couldn’t support President Biden’s Build Back Better bill brought months of negotiations to an end. But BBB is a big collection of stuff, so the next question is: Is there anything in there that Democrats can still pass?

E. J. Dionne makes the case for guarded optimism.

and 2021

The featured post takes aim at two year-in-review articles: one that tries to be funny but isn’t, and another that tries to be serious and ends up being ridiculous. But I did enjoy this one: the NYT’s “The Year in 41 Debates“, which recalls what we argued about this year.

Some of the questions are abstract, like “What does it mean to be woke?”, while others point to specific events, like “Should Obama get to celebrate his birthday?” and “What happened to Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend?”

The NYT doesn’t make any judgments about whether these topics were worth the attention they got, it just remembers them. Put together, the 41 questions bring 2021 back (in all its glory and silliness) like few other year-in-review articles can.

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The New Year brings a minimum-wage increase to 21 states.

and you also might be interested in …

Here’s the best summary of the difference between the parties: Democrats want to protect school children from mass shootings. Republicans want to protect them from books.

Fox News is outraged that a Texas teacher would publicly mock book-banners with a Dr. Seuss parody.

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While we’re talking about parody, McSweeney’s “Ayn Rand Writes Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer” is priceless, particularly to anybody who read as much Rand as I did in my misspent youth. Do you think being left out of reindeer games would have bothered Howard Roark?

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South Africa’s Bishop Desmond Tutu died yesterday. Joan Didion on Thursday. Edward O. Wilson this morning.

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Apparently God told an Evangelical woman to intrude on the conversation of two young female friends to warn them about the dangers of lesbianism. Because the small god Evangelicals worship often makes mistakes like that.

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Right-wing rhetoric against Dr. Fauci is getting increasingly violent.

Referring to tabloid-style surprise interviews, [Fox News host Jesse] Watters said in a speech that activists should “ambush” Dr. Fauci with adversarial questions that he deemed “the kill shot.” Describing the imagined effect of such a filmed confrontation, Mr. Watters added: “Boom! He is dead! He is dead! He’s done!”

And that’s another major difference between liberals and conservatives: Liberals embarrass their enemies with merciless Dr. Seuss parodies, while conservatives fantasize about “kill shots”.

I have no doubt that CNN or MSNBC would have fired any host who used similarly violent language during the Trump administration, but Fox News is not disciplining Watters in any way, reasoning that his kill-shot image is merely “metaphoric”.

No one disputes that, but the talking heads at Fox would never accept such an excuse from a liberal commentator at another network.

I mean, in 2017 nobody believed comedian Kathy Griffin had literally cut off Trump’s head, but she was not only fired from the CNN New Year’s Eve special, but spent two months on the federal no-fly list. The right-wing media still hates her; New Jersey’s Shore News Network could barely contain its glee in announcing this August that she had lung cancer.

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Sarah Palin is trying to become relevant again by going full anti-vax. One reason I say the GOP has passed the point of no return is that no one thinks they can become relevant on the Right by speaking truth and being reasonable.

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Another police conviction shows that the times might be changing. Police officer Kimberley Potter was convicted of first-degree manslaughter Thursday. In April, she killed Daunte Wright near Minneapolis when she mistook her gun for a taser. She’ll be sentenced in February. A typical sentence is about seven years. CNN analyzed:

“Three to five years ago, this would be a full acquittal, not even a concern over a mistrial. So the fact that we are now seeing more accountability for officers — the idea they are not above the law, that if they do the crime, they do the time,” criminal defense attorney Sara Azari said Thursday after the conviction. “It’s definitely not systemic change, but it is definitely a change in trend.”

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Former Governor Andrew Cuomo won’t be charged with sexually harassing a female police officer in his security detail. The prosecutor found the allegation of inappropriate touching to be “credible, deeply troubling, but not criminal under New York law.”

A attorney for Cuomo charged that NY Attorney General Letitia James pursued the investigation for political purposes, a quote that I’m sure will be ammunition for Trump to attack the NY state investigation into his shady financial dealings.

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Reuniting the immigrant families Trump separated is proving to be harder than it sounds.

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The agency that was supposed to oversee Trump’s illegal hotel lease never really looked at the ethical or constitutional issues.

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Doctor Historianess educates conservatives about freedom of speech.

#jaredschmeck was totally within his rights to say Let’s Go Brandon. But I’m within my rights to say Jared Schmeck is a total asshole. See how that works?

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Frank Bruni argues against using adverbs that commonly modify gay, such as openly or flamboyantly, terms which are almost never paired with straight.

When milestones are being chronicled and a succinct qualifier is in order [as when Pete Buttigieg was described as “the first openly gay cabinet secretary” to acknowledge the probable existence of closeted gay secretaries in the past], I indeed vote for “out” over “openly.” And otherwise? If a person’s sexual orientation or identity is specifically and indisputably relevant to a given article or conversation and isn’t a secret, call that person simply “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” “trans” or such. Let the “openly” be implicit.

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The Satanic Temple continues to point out the distinction between free expression of religion in public spaces and Christian supremacy. Their installation at the Illinois State Capitol of a baby Baphomet next to a Christian nativity scene has outraged Christians, who say that it “should have no place in this Capitol or any other place”.

But if you want a Christian nativity scene at the Capitol without any Satanic expression, then you don’t want religious freedom. You want Christian supremacy.

Personally, I would get rid of both displays. In America, government is a secular institution.

and let’s close with something musical

I suspect huskies evolved shortly after wolves and humans started singing together.

And can’t we all sympathize with this dog, who wants to stay mad, but can’t resist joining in on her favorite song?

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on December 6.

There’s still plenty of reason to fear where we are currently headed, but at the same time, there’s no reason to think that five years from now, at the next major Paris “stocktake,” we’ll still be headed there.

– David Roberts, “Don’t get too bummed out about COP26“

This week’s featured post is “Does the Red Pill have an antidote?“

This week everybody was talking about the Rittenhouse verdict

The 18-year-old vigilante was found not guilty on all counts.

I worry about the lessons people are learning from this verdict. As for Rittenhouse himself, I can’t guess. It’s possible that he was genuinely horrified to see people die at his own hand. Many stories tell of young men who were excited to go to war, and yet were traumatized to learn up close what it means to kill another human being. We can hope Rittenhouse responds similarly, and that even as he walks free, he is determined to avoid violence in the future.

On the other hand, he may have learned that killing makes you a hero, and has lasting negative consequences only for the people who die. If that’s the case, he will likely kill again.

As for the violent conservative movement that has lionized Rittenhouse, I have little doubt that they have been emboldened. Killing protesters is a widespread and longstanding fantasy on the Right. Until now, hitting them with a car has been the preferred method. But the Rittenhouse case established that you can walk up to protesters with a gun, and if they worry that you might be a mass shooter and try to disarm you, you can kill them in “self defense”. I’m sure we’ll see more of that. No doubt at this very moment, militia groups are holding training sessions on the loopholes in self-defense laws.

David French:

Most of the right-wing leaders voicing their admiration for Rittenhouse are simply adopting a pose. On Twitter, talk radio, and Fox News, hosts and right-wing personalities express admiration for Rittenhouse but know he was being foolish. They would never hand a rifle to their own children and tell them to walk into a riot. They would never do it themselves.

But these public poses still matter. When you turn a foolish young man into a hero, you’ll see more foolish young men try to emulate his example. And although the state should not permit rioters to run rampant in America’s streets, random groups of armed Americans are utterly incapable of imposing order themselves, and any effort to do so can lead to greater death and carnage.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened in Rittenhouse’s case. He didn’t impose order. He didn’t stop a riot. He left a trail of bodies on the ground, and two of the people he shot were acting on the belief that Rittenhouse himself was an active shooter. He had, after all, just killed a man.

Farhad Manjoo amplifies that last point, noting that the Rittenhouse shootings “unravel some of the foundational tenets of gun advocacy”.

That guns are effective and necessary weapons of self-defense. That without them, lawlessness and tyranny would prevail. And that in the right hands — in the hands of the “good guys” — guns promote public safety rather than destroy it.

In the Rittenhouse case, none of that was true. At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it. The gun transformed situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street. And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself — he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon.

This is self-defense as circular reasoning: Rittenhouse says he carried a rifle in order to guarantee his safety during a violent protest. He was forced to shoot at four people when his life and the lives of other people were threatened, he says. What was he protecting everyone from? The gun strapped to his own body, the one he’d brought to keep everyone safe.

I am struck by the fact that the only people who died in the Kenosha riots were the ones Rittenhouse killed. He was the primary danger.

The legal wrangling over this case is likely not over. A civil lawsuit for wrongful death is a possibility, though Jonathan Turley warns against it. There’s also a disagreement over the vast sums of money raised for Rittenhouse’s defense. The state will return his $2 million bail, but to whom? Rittenhouse himself? His lawyers? The fund-raisers?

Turley is also skeptical that Rittenhouse can win a defamation lawsuit for all the negative things people have said about him.

and Paul Gosar

who was censured by the House and expelled from his committees on Wednesday.

The vote was close to splitting on party lines: Among Republicans, only established anti-MAGA representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger voted for the censure.

Republicans like Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy complained that by taking away Gosar’s committee assignments the censure resolution went too far. But (as so often happens) they offered no counter-proposal. I can find no suggestion that Republicans other than Cheney and Kinzinger were willing to reprimand Gosar in any way. Speaker Pelosi waited ten days for the GOP caucus to discipline its own member, and acted only when it was clear they would not.

I think AOC summed it up pretty well:

What is so hard about saying this is wrong? This is not about me. This is not about Rep. Gosar. This is about what we are willing to accept. … If you believe that this behavior should not be accepted, then vote yes.

As many people have pointed out, no other workplace would tolerate this. If you posted a video depicting yourself killing a colleague you frequently disagreed with, you’d be fired.

Gosar defended himself by saying that it’s just a cartoon. But if what Gosar did wasn’t over the line, where is the line? What if he had superimposed his own and AOC’s heads on a rape cartoon? What if the cartoon had been more realistic?

As we saw again and again during the Trump years, Republicans don’t want to answer such questions. Democrats were always “overreacting” to Trump, but Republicans would not react at all, and would never speculate on how far they might let him go in the future. Ultimately, they saw him unleash a mob on Congress itself, and still did nothing.

The same moral cowardice is on display here: Kevin McCarthy knows the MAGA faction will eventually cross any line he might draw, and he won’t want to respond then either. So he says nothing.

For his part, Gosar remained defiant. “I explained to [the Republican House caucus] what was happening. I did not apologize. I said this video didn’t have anything to do with harming anybody.” After the censure, he reposted the offending video and then took it down again.

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Gosar also suggests that Kyle Rittenhouse get a Congressional Medal of Honor “for selflessly protecting the lives and property of the people from an armed mob of arsonists and criminals”. [I see the link no longer works, presumably because the tweet has been taken down. I had verified the tweet myself before trying to link to it.]

Bottom line: Like much of the far right, Gosar is pro-violence — as long as people he likes are attacking people he doesn’t like.

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One reason McCarthy is such a pushover for the MAGA faction is that he fears he won’t be named speaker if Republicans get the majority back in 2022. Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows appeared Thursday on Rep. Matt Gaetz’ podcast and suggested that a new Republican House majority should bypass McCarthy and name Trump as speaker. (Only tradition says that the Speaker has to be a member of the House.)

Since Trump has no legislative agenda, I can only see two purposes in making him Speaker:

• As Speaker, he could sabotage the country by blocking bills to fund the government or raise the debt ceiling.
• Being Speaker would put him in the presidential line of succession, in case his violent followers could somehow get Biden and Harris out of the way. I’m sure Trump himself would never suggest such a thing, unless maybe he were “joking”.

and Build Back Better

A version of the bill passed the House. What happens in the Senate is anybody’s guess. Here’s CNBC’s speculation:

Multiple senators will push for changes to the bill’s provisions including paid leave and taxes along the way. Any tweaks will require another vote in the House, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can afford three defections (only one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, voted against the bill Friday). …

[Senator Joe] Manchin, who has not publicly endorsed the package as he expresses concerns about spending and inflation, will seek at least one overhaul. He has signaled he will push to scrap a House provision offering four weeks of paid leave to most Americans.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is another Democrats who could seek to influence the bill in the Senate. She already shot down her party’s efforts to hike tax rates on the biggest businesses and wealthiest individuals, forcing lawmakers to opt for more complicated policies such as a minimum tax on corporations.

The open question in my mind is whether Manchin’s and Sinema’s votes are really available. If they are, some compromise will pass the Senate and go back to the House. But I can also imagine that at least one of them is just stringing out the process and will never get on board.

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Kevin McCarthy delayed the House vote by unleashing a record-breaking eight hour and 32 minute speech. Unsurprisingly, much of what he said wasn’t true.

and the pandemic

The recent surge in cases accelerated this week: the 7-day average of new cases per day is up to 93K from a recent low of 71K November 4. Hospitalizations have turned up as well: +6% in the last two weeks. Deaths are still falling, but not sharply: down 9%.

I speculated last week that vaccines and better treatment might keep the rise in cases from leading to a rise in deaths, but that’s still uncertain. Typically there’s a time lag between when cases start rising and when deaths start rising. The rise in hospitalizations is worrisome.

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No, Anthony Fauci had nothing to do with a beagle experiment in Tunisia. Lots of people aren’t even trying to tell the truth any more.

White Coat Waste spokesman Justin Goodman … defended the decision to capitalize on the anti-Fauci fervor that has been brewing for more than a year and a half. “When you have such a high-profile person to point the finger at for funding animal experiments, it would be malpractice for us not to do that,” he said.

and climate change

David Roberts isn’t as bummed about the COP26 meetings in Glasgow as many environmentalists seem to be. First, he says, you need to appreciate what these meetings are and aren’t. They aren’t legislatures.

[A] COP agreement can’t make a country do anything. … The utility of the Paris process is that every few years it provides the equivalent of a giant camera flash, revealing where everyone stands. That is useful. International transparency and peer pressure can sometimes move national governments. But it is a mistake to invest any particular hopes for change in the UNFCCC process — it can’t really do anything. It can only illuminate what is being done.

What is being done currently isn’t enough, but we’re also not at the end of the story.

The good news is, we’re making progress. A decade ago, we were on track for 4° to 6° Celsius average warming by the end of the century, which would have been species-threatening.

As this report from Climate Action Tracker shows, thanks to actions taken by national governments since then, we have “bent the curve” on climate change, as it were, and brought the average expected warming down to 2.7°C.

That would still be devastating. But we’re not going to stop there. Progress is only accelerating. … There’s still plenty of reason to fear where we are currently headed, but at the same time, there’s no reason to think that five years from now, at the next major Paris “stocktake,” we’ll still be headed there.

In parallel with a COP meeting, there’s always “climate festival-cum-trade-show, featuring governments, nonprofits, and private-sector actors announcing all kinds of new campaigns and initiatives alongside the UNFCCC process”. Roberts found this part of the meeting encouraging.

[N]ational governments are often going to be in the caboose of this train — civic groups, the private sector, and subnational governments are leading the way. That’s distributed all over the world, less easy to see and sum up, but it shows that the caution and intransigence of national governments are not the whole story.

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A long article in yesterday’s NYT examined how China got control of the vast cobalt supplies of the Congo, giving it a huge advantage in the battery technology needed by the electric cars that are the best hope for cutting CO2 emissions.

During the Cold War, US policy focused on keeping the Soviet Union from controlling Congo’s natural resources. But after the Soviet government collapsed, interest in those resources waned under multiple administrations. In 2016, when a US company, Freeport-McMoRan, made bad investments in fossil fuels and needed to sell assets to pay down debt, only Chinese companies made bids. A second sale to China Molybdenum closed in 2020.

and you also might be interested in …

The Pollo Tropical restaurant chain in Florida came up with an ingenious solution to its labor shortage: It paid workers more.

[Parent company CEO Richard] Stockinger said Pollo Tropical had also offered hiring incentives and improved its benefits package by adding childcare leave, company-paid educational programs, and more affordable medical plans. These measures would help its restaurants “remain competitive in these challenging market conditions,” he said.

The chain will compensate by raising prices.

Adam Smith would have predicted this supply-and-demand result, but it’s funny how such stuff gets discussed in most of the media: When the fluctuations of the labor market go against workers, that’s just how life is. But when they benefit workers, it’s some kind of crisis.

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Self-described socialist Fredrik deBoer makes some of the same observations I’ve been making for a while:

What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.

Looking at the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primary races, he observes that (whatever else might be said about the fairness of the process) Bernie Sanders didn’t get as many votes as the candidates he lost to.

Whatever else we may want to say about the system, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the voters of the liberal party in American politics twice had the opportunity to nominate Mr. Sanders as their candidate for president and twice declined to do so. If we don’t allow this to inform our understanding of the popularity of our politics, we’ll never move forward and start winning elections to gain more power in our system.

This may be seen as a betrayal of the socialist principles I stand for, which are at heart an insistence on the absolute moral equality of every person and a fierce commitment to fighting for the worst-off with whatever social and governmental means are necessary. But I am writing this precisely because I believe so deeply in those principles. I want socialism to win, and to do that, socialists must be ruthless with ourselves. … Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country.

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Beau of the Fifth Column addresses a practical problem: how to convince your parents to get vaccinated. He suggests two arguments: First, find out whether they are afraid of some specific ingredient they think the vaccines contain. Probably that chemical isn’t there at all. Second, point out that even if you believe the most exaggerated estimates of people who have vaccine side-effects, taking the vaccine is still safer than getting Covid.

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The best-of-2021 lists have started appearing. The WaPo’s best ten books is, as usual, humbling. I haven’t read any of them.

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Trump’s mail-slowing postmaster general may finally be on his way out.

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Department of I-can’t-believe-somebody-had-to-prove-that-but-I-guess-they-did: The new book Homelessness is a Housing Problem looks at regional variations in the rate of homelessness, and concludes that the problem is high rents. Not drug abuse or mental illness or unemployment or any of the other frequently cited explanations.

If your community has a lot of homeless people, it should build more housing they can afford. It’s really that simple.

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Matt Yglesias points out a problem with the focus on social-justice language: A group like the AMA might adopt language changes and leave its inequality-producing policies in place.

[B]ecause doctors are perennially in such short supply in the United States, they can afford to be extremely choosy about their assignments. You never have a down-on-his-luck doctor looking for work and realizing that there’s demand for medical care in poor neighborhoods or rural communities. Even more subtly, because doctors are scarce, they can afford to treat their patients relatively poorly. …

There are lots of ways to increase medical abundance, but unfortunately, the AMA is normally standing in the way — blocking increased scope of practice for nurses, making it hard for foreign-trained doctors to practice in the United States, and historically pushing to train too few doctors here at home.

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I took this screenshot while browsing the NYT on Tuesday. In the view of the NYT opinion-page editors, four articles prophesying doom for the Democrats constitutes a “debate”.

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Speaking of the Democrats, they face two separate problems in 2022:

• Getting people to vote for them.
• Overcoming gerrymandering that could give Republicans a majority even if most voters choose Democrats.

Gerrymandering is getting worse, but recent Supreme Court decisions have closed off most avenues for challenging gerrymandered maps in court.

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The Staples Center in LA is about to become the Crypto.com Arena. I am nostalgic for the era when the Lakers played in the Forum, the 76ers in the Spectrum, and the Celtics in the Boston Garden. As far as I know, Madison Square Garden in New York is the NBA’s lone survivor of those simpler times. Now the New Orleans Pelicans play in the Smoothy King Center.

In his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace parodied the naming-rights-for-money trend with the notion of subsidized time. Events take place during the Year of Glad and the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment.

For decades, fans have been struggling to turn the ever-changing corporate names into something as charming as the traditional ones (like referring to the former Verizon Center in DC — now the Capital One Arena — as “the Phone Booth”). I hear Crypto.com is likely to be nicknamed “The Crypt”, which doesn’t bode well for the teams that will play there. Personally, I’d prefer to pretend it’s named for Krypto the Superdog, and refer to it as the Dog House.

and let’s close with something visual

As even amateur photographers know, it’s hard to get the Moon to pose just the way you want.

In the days and hours leading up to the counting of the electoral votes in Congress, a cadre of outside lawyers to the President spun a web of lies and disinformation, to him and to the public, for the purpose of pressuring the Vice President to betray his oath to uphold our laws and the Constitution of the United States. … There is no room in the legal profession for Grima Wormtongues who counsel their clients with half-truths and deceptive presentations made in pursuit of a personal agenda.

– Greg Jacob
Chief Counsel to Vice President Mike Pence
January, 2021

This week’s featured post is “Freedom Isn’t What It Used To Be“.

This week everybody was talking about the state of the Democrats’ negotiations

Thursday, President Biden announced a slimmed-down version of his Build Back Better plan: $1.75 trillion versus the previous $3.5 trillion. Senators Manchin and Sinema have not endorsed the plan, but they also haven’t rejected it. Josh Marshall observes that “The number of outstanding issues has dropped precipitously.”

So maybe we’re almost there. Vox has a summary of what Biden’s framework (it’s still not a bill) contains, but I’m trying not to get too excited one way or another until we know that it’s really going to happen.

and the Virginia governor’s race

Tomorrow is election day in Virginia. It comes at a bad time for the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe. The Democrats’ struggle to pass some version of Biden’s agenda makes them look ineffective right now, even if it might result in significant action soon. The latest Covid surge is fading, but the back-to-normal promise of last spring is still unfulfilled. Inflation and supply-chain issues are global, but Biden is being blamed for them.

In addition, Republicans are trying out their 2022 strategy. Biden beat Trump by more than seven million votes in 2020 for two main reasons:

• Huge Black turnout.
• Previously Republican suburban voters, especially educated women, turned against Trump.

Maybe in some parallel universe Republicans are responding to that resounding rejection by toning down the racism and sexism of the Trump years. But in our world, they’re passing laws to make voting harder for Black people, while hyping a phony issue (critical race theory in the public schools) to scare White parents away from Democrats.

Voter suppression is hard to do in Virginia, which currently has a Democratic governor and legislature. But the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Glenn Youngkin, is all-in for the phony issue. Paul Waldman puts it like this:

Imagine it’s January 2023, and Gov. Youngkin gathers his staff for a meeting to celebrate the end of his first year in office. “I want to congratulate all of you,” he says. “We’ve done just what we said we would: For the last year, all of you have worked tirelessly, day in and day out, to make sure no critical race theory is taught in any school in the state.”

That scene is preposterous to the point of parody. The idea that what Youngkin would do as governor has even a remote relationship to what he is running on is absurd.

Recent polls are close, but show Youngkin with a very small lead and momentum. If he wins, Republicans will feel their 2022 strategy is good to go nationally.

and the climate summit

World leaders are currently meeting in Glasgow to attempt to hammer out a successor to the Paris Agreement of 2015, which Trump withdrew the United States from.

President Biden would like to be a leader in forging a significant agreement, but his position has been undercut by the changes Senator Manchin of coal-mining West Virginia has forced on his Build Back Better plan.

If Mr. Biden lacks a reliable plan for the United States to significantly cut its emissions this decade, it would “send a signal” to other major emitters that America is still not serious, [Lia Nicholson, a senior adviser to the Alliance of Small Island States] said. And it would be difficult for Mr. Biden to urge other countries to take more meaningful steps away from fossil fuels, others said.

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Biden went to Glasgow from the G-20 meeting in Rome, which endorsed a 15% minimum corporate tax. Up to now, corporations have been able to play countries off against one another, creating a race to the bottom on corporate tax rates. If the G-20 nations follow through, that race would stop.

and the pandemic

Tuesday, an advisory committee for the FDA recommended approving Covid vaccinations for children ages 5-11. Vaccines are already approved for everyone 12 and up. The vaccines for younger children are still not available and there’s considerable disagreement about how many families will want them.

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Case numbers are not falling as fast as in recent weeks. The US is averaging about 73K new cases per day, which is about the same as last week. Deaths are down to an average of 1346 a day, down from over 1400 last week. The NYT is reporting that unvaccinated people are dying at about 12 times the rate of fully vaccinated people.

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The Supreme Court refused to block Maine’s vaccine mandate. The case was brought by healthcare workers who were up against the Friday deadline.

This is a shadow docket case asking for emergency relief, so no majority opinion was published. Justice Gorsuch did write a dissent, which Justices Alito and Thomas signed on to. Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh published a one-paragraph concurrence on largely technical grounds: The shadow docket shouldn’t be used to force the court to rule on a case that otherwise was unlikely to reach them.

Briefly, the reason for Gorsuch’s dissent is that healthcare workers can get an exemption for medical reasons, but not for religious reasons. His argument builds on previous ridiculous opinions from 2020-21 that elevate the most tenuous religious claims to the highest level — if they’re based on popular Christian (especially Catholic) beliefs. Gorsuch also quotes the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop case, which similarly granted conservative Christian beliefs about marriage a level of consideration no non-Christian belief will ever get from this Court.

The plaintiffs’ religious objection in this case is

that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine required the use of abortion-related materials in its production, and that Moderna and Pfizer relied on aborted fetal cell lines to develop their vaccines.

Note how far we have gotten, both in time and in the causal chain, from any actual abortion. I’m not sure what the J&J issue is, but for Pfizer and Moderna we’re talking about a cell line developed from an abortion in 1973, with no suggestion that the research value of the cells played any role in the abortion decision. This is the kind of thing I was talking about in 2013 when I described conservative “religious freedom” as passive aggression. People are arbitrarily extending their moral concerns for the purpose of tripping up other people.

If a policy Gorsuch liked were at stake, would he give similar weight to a Hindu whose scruple is based on a sacred cow killed in 1973, none of whose original cells are present? What if someone’s religious objection had a similarly long causal chain related to climate change? (The implementation of just about any policy involves fossil fuels at some point.)

Those cases would be laughed out of court. But three justices want to approve this one, because Gorsuch et al grant special rights to people who share their religious beliefs.

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Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto tested positive for Covid, which is a big deal for a guy whose lungs were involved in a previous bout with cancer. He believes that being vaccinated has saved his life, and said so on the air, while urging his viewers to get vaccinated. “Then came the death threats,” NPR reports.

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I’m not going to repost the graph (because it has tiny print and displays really badly), but you should look at Duke sociology Professor Kieran Healy’s “The Polarization of Death“. He groups US counties into deciles, based on Trump’s percentage of the 2020 vote, and then plots the cumulative Covid death rates per 100K people through time. This results in “an ecological picture of the relationship between deaths and political polarization”.

The bluest decile starts out with the most deaths. (Recall how the first wave hammered New York City, the Northeast, and big cities in general.) But last year’s Thanksgiving-to-New-Years holiday surge primarily targeted the reddest counties, and by now the deciles are in almost-perfect order, from the 90-100% Trump counties averaging over 300 deaths per 100K to the 10-20% counties a hair above 200. (The 0-10% counties are slightly higher than the 10-20% counties. That’s the only out-of-sequence result.)

You can imagine a lot of explanations for this, including that Trump counties tend to have more old people than Biden counties. But the Trumpist resistance to public health measures of all sorts has to play an important role.

and Halloween

which was yesterday. For some reason, what caught my attention this year was the funny stuff rather than the creepy or scary stuff.

You don’t see a lot of telescope jokes.

And candy corn had enough PR problems before someone noticed its resemblance to a former president.

I loved this tweet from (currently suspended) @leahtriss:

I’m going as a Former Gifted Kid for Hallowe’en. The whole costume is just going to be people asking “What are you supposed to be?” and me saying, “I was supposed to be a lot of things.”

And finally: Ruth Vader Ginsburg wielding her light gavel.

and the Trump coup

This week we found out about an article Mike Pence’s chief counsel Greg Jacobs drafted but decided not to publish after January 6. The most striking quote is at the top of this page.

Emails exchanged during the riot between Jacobs and John Eastman, the architect of the Pence-can-undo-the-election theory, also came out. Jacobs blamed the siege of the Capitol on Eastman’s “bullshit legal advice”. Eastman replied that

The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened

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Rolling Stone has a long article about Trump officials and Republican members of Congress who helped plan the January 6 demonstrations. To me, the key point is whether the people at those planning sessions knew or should have known that the event would turn violent. If January 6 had just been a Trump rally, followed by a march to surround the Capitol and yell a lot, that would have been a legitimate use of the right to assemble. If I were somebody involved in January 6 planning, I’d claim the violence was a complete surprise to me.

and more book restrictions in Texas

Following up on “Reading While Texan” from two weeks ago: The Texas Tribune reports that a Republican state representative (who is running for attorney general) is opening an official legislative “inquiry into Texas school district content”. So far that mainly means that he has sent a list of 850 books to the districts, asking them how many copies they have of each, where they shelve them, and how much they spent acquiring them.

The accompanying letter asks for information on additional

books or content … that address or contain the following topics: human sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), sexually explicit images, graphic presentations of sexual behavior that is in violation of the law, or contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

By focusing on how content “might make students feel”, the inquiry liberates itself from any objective criteria. (Ever notice how fuck-your-feelings conservatives turn into bleeding hearts as soon as White people are upset?) It also risks misidentifying the root cause of those feelings. Being well informed is not always comfortable. (“The more knowledge, the more grief,” says Ecclesiastes.) So if reading Me and White Supremacy causes “discomfort”, maybe the problem is white supremacy, not the book.

The legislator’s list includes highly regarded titles like The New Jim Crow, Caste, Between the World and Me, and just about any other book you can think of that suggests America might have a race problem. (New Kid, which I talked about two weeks ago, is on the list.) It includes novels, graphic novels, memoirs, history books, and books about the physical changes teens might be noticing in their bodies. Oddly, the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is on the list, but the original is not. And I’m not totally sure why V For Vendetta is listed.

It’s not a censorship list (yet), but the fact that these books are the subject of an “inquiry” is bound to have the kind of chilling effect on teachers and librarians that I talked about two weeks ago.

A counterpoint is Maia Kobabe’s op-ed in the Washington Post about the banning (in multiple school districts) of her graphic (in the words-plus-drawings sense) book Gender Queer: a memoir.

Queer youth are often forced to look outside their own homes, and outside the education system, to find information on who they are. Removing or restricting queer books in libraries and schools is like cutting a lifeline for queer youth, who might not yet even know what terms to ask Google to find out more about their own identities, bodies and health.

and you also might be interested in …

Paul Krugman on the current inflation/supply-chain problems:

The most important point, however, may be not to overreact to current events. The fact that shortages and inflation are happening around the world is actually an indication that national policies aren’t the main cause of the problems. They are, instead, largely inevitable as economies try to restart after the epic disruptions caused by Covid-19. It will take time to sort things out — more time than most people, myself included, expected. But a frantic attempt to restore the status quo on inflation would do more harm than good.

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The migrant families who had their children stolen away by the Trump administration may get compensation from the Biden administration.

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A case that initially seemed to validate the conservative dark fantasy about trans people and bathrooms turns out not to be as it first appeared.

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Contrary to opinions I’ve been linking to in recent weeks, a University of Virginia professor claims Trump can claim executive privilege.

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Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen-ager who killed two people during anti-police demonstrations in Racine, and who has become a hero on the Right, seems to have lucked into a biased judge. The defense can refer to the people he killed as “looters” and “rioters”, but the prosecution is not allowed to call them “victims”.

When liberals complain about the growing violence of the Right, the usual response is to point to the sporadic clashes between liberal demonstrators and police during the George Floyd protests. The Rittenhouse-is-a-hero phenomenon, though, has no parallel on the Left. Ditto for Ashley-Babbitt-is-a-martyr.

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You’ll never guess who’s been getting the biggest paychecks in the NFL: the commissioner, Roger Goodell. He was paid $128 million over the last two years. The highest-paid player, Patrick Mahommes, makes a measly $45 million a year.

That comparison of executive and athlete salaries reminds me of what Babe Ruth is supposed to have said during the Depression, when somebody pointed out that his $80,000 salary was more than President Hoover was making: “I had a better year than he did.”

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Slate posted an article “Historians Are Fighting” about the within-the-profession battles touched off by The 1619 Project, which posits the preservation of slavery as a major motivation for the American Revolution. It seems to me that there’s room for a middle ground about the Founders: We can celebrate their revolution as a generally positive step in the global march towards democracy and human rights, while correcting past scholarship that air-brushed their failings and made them into gods. Liberty-for-White-Christian-males was a glass-partly-full in a world of mostly empty glasses.

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Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi looks at what she calls the “desert problem” of Dune, both in the new movie and in Frank Herbert’s original book. One thing that has changed since the novel’s debut in 1968 is the attention we pay to cultural appropriation, or what Edward Said labeled “orientalism” in his 1978 book.

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Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) is being investigated by the SEC for insider trading. Burr sold $1.6 million in stocks in January and February of 2020, shortly before the market reacted to the Covid pandemic by dropping sharply. Burr’s brother-in-law also unloaded stock around the same time, shortly after a phone conversation with Burr.

Burr was cleared by the Trump Justice Department (which more and more looks like it bore the same resemblance to justice that Trump University did to universities) on Trump’s last day in office, but the SEC has continued to investigate.

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Rand Paul reported — 16 months past the legal deadline — that his wife bought stock in Gilead Sciences, the maker of anti-Covid drug remdesivir, on February 26, 2020. That would be after a committee Paul sits on had been briefed about the approaching global pandemic, but before the danger was appreciated by the general public.

There are a couple of reasons why this isn’t the torches-and-pitchforks scandal that Burr’s might be: Gilead stock in fact didn’t take off. (The article says Paul’s wife is slightly underwater on the investment.) And the investment was less than $15K.

Still, I think Chris Hayes has the right take on this:

Let’s imagine how @RandPaul would react to this news if it were about Fauci.

To me, all the questions about whether congresspeople were trading on inside information raises a more basic question: Why are they allowed to trade stocks at all? They’re paid a nice salary, have a good pension plan, and usually have good job prospects if they leave or lose their seats without disgracing themselves. Would it be such a hardship to lock their investments in an index fund while they’re in office?

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University of Florida has ordered three of its professors not to testify as expert witnesses against the state’s voter suppression law. The university characterized the expert-witness gig as “outside paid work that is adverse to the university’s interests as a state of Florida institution”.

Actually, though, the lawsuit the wants the professors’ testimony is just adverse to the De Santis administration and the Republican Party, not the state of Florida. If UF has been threatened with repercussions if its professors testify, that’s a significant violation of American political traditions, and probably the law. Josh Marshall comments:

One of the features of American democracy is a fairly sharp line between political activity, the electoral activity of parties and the functions of the state. A state governor has budgets and powers to run the state. But he or she can’t use them to run for reelection. Ignoring these distinctions was one of the most defining features of Trump’s presidency. I am the state, as it were. We can see now that that approach increasingly suffuses the whole GOP.

and let’s close with something brilliant

Financial Times identifies twenty of the most “brilliant” bookstores in the world. Several are in the US, but none of the American shops look quite as awesome as the Dujiangyan Zhongshuge Bookstore in Sichuan, China, which was profiled in more detail in Architectural Digest. I’m not sure how you get to all those shelves, though.

I am actually old enough … I mean, I know that Republicans in Texas have been conservative for a long time, but there was a time when conservative Republicans in Texas were not absolutely batshit crazy.

– Charlie Sykes

This week’s featured post is “Reading While Texan“.

This week everybody was talking about Manchin and Sinema

For weeks we’ve been wondering what price they would demand for getting on board with the Build Back Better reconciliation bill. We’re starting to see that price, and it’s steep.

Manchin is against the Clean Electricity Payment Program, which subsidizes the shift away from fossil fuels for generating electricity.

The $150 billion program — officially known as the Clean Electricity Performance Program, or CEPP — would reward energy suppliers who switch from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas to clean power sources like solar, wind, and nuclear power, which already make up about 40 percent of the industry, and fine those who do not.

Manchin claims the program isn’t necessary, because the shift is happening anyway. (The change he cites is over a 20 years period, and mainly shows a shift from coal to natural gas, a somewhat cleaner fossil fuel.) But it makes a huge difference how fast the shift happens. Remember: The most direct plan for cutting carbon emissions is just two steps long:

• Electrify everything.
• Generate electricity without fossil fuels.

He also wants means tests on a number of programs, including the child tax credit, and possibly also a work requirement for parents who get the credit.

Sinema says she won’t vote for Build Back Better until the House passes the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Since it’s almost certain the House will eventually vote for the bill, this plan only makes sense if she wants to back out of whatever commitments she makes in the negotiations to pass both bills.

She also opposes the tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy that pay for the bill in its current form. I’m not sure whether she wants a smaller increase or no increase. Democrats are discussing a carbon tax to fill the fiscal hole, though I’m not sure what Manchin would think of that.

and subpoenas

With Trump’s encouragement, a number of his administration’s former officials and unofficial advisers are defying subpoenas from the House January 6 Committee. The committee will vote tomorrow on whether to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress.

“This potential criminal contempt referral — or will-be criminal contempt referral for Steve Bannon — is the first shot over the bow,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who serves on the committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union Sunday. “It’s very real, but it says to anybody else coming in front of the committee, ‘Don’t think that you’re gonna be able to just kind of walk away and we’re gonna forget about you. We’re not.’”

It’s important not to lose sight of just how far the country has gone down this rabbit hole. We’ve gotten used to the idea that Trump obstructs justice. He obstructed the Mueller investigation, the Ukraine investigation of his first impeachment, and the January 6 investigation of his second impeachment. We’ve gotten used to the idea that he makes laughable claims in lawsuits, purely for the purpose of using the courts to delay the release of potentially damaging information.

But Trump’s intransigence is not just politics, it’s new territory in American politics — recall Hillary Clinton testifying to the Benghazi Committee for 11 hours — and it threatens the rule of law. We once believed that politicians would avoid this kind of behavior out of shame, because of course the voters would ask “What is he hiding?” But Trump hides everything, so it’s just what he does. We once believed that no president would pardon his co-conspirators, or that Congress would of course respond to such an outrage by removing him from office. But Trump has done precisely that, and Republican senators let him.

“This potential criminal contempt referral — or will-be criminal contempt referral for Steve Bannon — is the first shot over the bow,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who serves on the committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union Sunday. “It’s very real, but it says to anybody else coming in front of the committee, ‘Don’t think that you’re gonna be able to just kind of walk away and we’re gonna forget about you. We’re not.’”

Bannon has zero justification for not testifying:

• He was not a government official during the lead-up to January 6.
• Former presidents have no claim on executive privilege unless the current president grants it, and Biden has not.
• Executive privilege allows a witness not to answer specific questions. It doesn’t justify refusing to testify.

But the law is not the point: Trump wants to run out the clock on this investigation the way he did on all the others. If his party can get the House back in 2022, presumably Kevin McCarthy will get the investigation stopped, and the public will never know what crimes Trump (or Bannon or any of the others) committed.

What’s most appalling is not that Trump and his cronies would try this. It’s that Republicans support his obstruction up and down the line (with rare exceptions like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger), and he loses no support among his followers.

and the economy

As the economy comes back from the pandemic recession, workers are quitting their jobs in unprecedented numbers. Economists are calling it “The Great Resignation“.

“Quits,” as the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, are rising in almost every industry. For those in leisure and hospitality, especially, the workplace must feel like one giant revolving door. Nearly 7 percent of employees in the “accommodations and food services” sector left their job in August. That means one in 14 hotel clerks, restaurant servers, and barbacks said sayonara in a single month. Thanks to several pandemic-relief checks, a rent moratorium, and student-loan forgiveness, everybody, particularly if they are young and have a low income, has more freedom to quit jobs they hate and hop to something else.

Atlantic’s Derek Thompson continues:

As a general rule, crises leave an unpredictable mark on history. It didn’t seem obvious that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 would lead to a revolution in architecture, and yet, it without a doubt contributed directly to the invention of the skyscraper in Chicago. You might be equally surprised that one of the most important scientific legacies of World War II had nothing to do with bombs, weapons, or manufacturing; the conflict also accelerated the development of penicillin and flu vaccines. If you asked me to predict the most salutary long-term effects of the pandemic last year, I might have muttered something about urban redesign and office filtration. But we may instead look back to the pandemic as a crucial inflection point in something more fundamental: Americans’ attitudes toward work. Since early last year, many workers have had to reconsider the boundaries between boss and worker, family time and work time, home and office.

Paul Krugman weighs in:

Until recently conservatives blamed expanded jobless benefits, claiming that these benefits were reducing the incentive to accept jobs. But states that canceled those benefits early saw no increase in employment compared with those that didn’t, and the nationwide end of enhanced benefits last month doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the job situation.

What seems to be happening instead is that the pandemic led many U.S. workers to rethink their lives and ask whether it was worth staying in the lousy jobs too many of them had.

For America is a rich country that treats many of its workers remarkably badly. Wages are often low; adjusted for inflation, the typical male worker earned virtually no more in 2019 than his counterpart did 40 years earlier. Hours are long: America is a “no-vacation nation,” offering far less time off than other advanced countries. Work is also unstable, with many low-wage workers — and nonwhite workers in particular — subject to unpredictable fluctuations in working hours that can wreak havoc on family life.

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All along, economists figured that when the economy started to recover, there would be a blip of inflation. Production would have trouble ramping up as fast as spending, as many Americans would have money in their pockets due to a combination of government programs and their inability to spend normally during the pandemic. (Being retired, I don’t want to think about all the driving vacations my wife and I would have taken, which probably would have pushed us to buy a new car by now.)

The question was whether inflation would just blip up briefly, or whether a new inflationary cycle would start that would require some policy intervention (i.e., higher interest rates) to get under control. Paul Krugman has been on what he calls “Team Transitory”, but now he’s not sure; the data he would ordinarily use to tell the difference between the two scenarios is (as he puts it) “weird”. In other words, the current covid/post-covid economy is unique in ways that make it hard to read. He still argues against raising interest rates, because he sees cutting off the recovery as a bigger risk than letting inflation run for a while.

More about inflation in this Washington Post article.

and John Gruden

John Gruden, head coach of the Los Vegas Raiders NFL football team, resigned last Monday, after emails leaked out where he made racist, sexist, and homophobic comments. The emails were part of a trove of 650K emails related to the Washington Football Team (then called the Redskins), which the NFL was investigating because of reports of the toxic and abusive work environment for the team cheerleaders, and possibly other female employees. Presumably somebody at the NFL is responsible for the leak.

The Gruden emails were sent between 2010 and 2018, and though Gruden was not connected with the WFT at the time, he was corresponding with WFT President Bruce Allen, whose emails were being examined. The Gruden emails leaked out of the NFL’s investigation without being formally released.

There’s a lot not to like about this scandal. The comments themselves are reprehensible, and it makes perfect sense that Gruden should leave the Raiders now that they are public. Like every other team in the NFL, the Raiders have a large number of black players, as well as the NFL’s only openly gay player, who came out in June. Knowing that your coach uses slurs against people like you has got to disrupt your relationship with the team. So the players deserve a new coach.

In general, though, I dislike scandals based on people’s private conversations becoming public years later. If I had to be judged by the worst thing I ever said to someone I trusted not to repeat it, I doubt I could pass muster. My guess is that few Americans could. In particular, I wonder how many other NFL coaches could be taken down if their private emails were published.

So yes, Gruden is racist, sexist, homophobic, … but he’s also unlucky, in that he wandered into a investigation aimed at somebody else. And whoever leaked the emails seems to have intentionally targeted him. (First one email came out, and when it started to look like he might weather that storm, more appeared.) By condemning Gruden, we may be inadvertently carrying out somebody’s vendetta.

But any sympathy I might have had for Gruden vanished when he responded by saying that there was “not a blade of racism” in him. I don’t know why people say clueless crap like that, especially right after evidence surfaces that they do have those blades. American culture is a toxic stew of prejudices of all sorts, and we’ve all been soaking in it. Why can’t we just acknowledge that, and then affirm that we’re trying our best to overcome it? (Here’s an example of me practicing what I’m preaching.) It would be refreshing to hear someone respond to past evidence of racism with “I’ve learned a lot since then.” rather than “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.“

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The other thing not to like about the Gruden story is that he may not be the worst person in it. Reportedly, the Gruden emails also “featured photos of topless Washington Football Team cheerleaders”. It’s not clear whether Gruden was sending or receiving the images, but Allen was the WFT insider. Was he sharing illicit photos of his female employees?

And that raises a bigger question: The NFL launched this investigation in response to media reports that the Washington Football Team owner and executives harassed women, circulated surreptitiously obtained photos and videos of team cheerleaders, and put the women in “what they considered unsafe situations” with high-rolling season-ticket holders. Why is this the only thing that leaks out? Why is Gruden the only one to lose his job?

The report from that investigation is still secret, though we know that the team was fined $10 million dollars. And while that sounds like a lot, it really isn’t for a team valued at more than $4 billion. And remember: Whenever some law or rule or standard is only enforced by a fine, that means you can break it if you’re rich enough.

Chris Hayes discusses these issues with a former WFT cheerleader.

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Friday, the NYT reported on the cozy relationship between Allen and the NFL general counsel who supervises investigations like the one into Allen’s team.

and you also might be interested in …

The downward trend in the Covid numbers continues: New cases are down 22% in the last two weeks, deaths down 19%.

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One of those deaths was Colin Powell, who died at 84. He was vaccinated, but was fighting a cancer that compromised his immune system.

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As Angela Merkel leaves the chancellorship of Germany, Thom Hartman notes all the ways that her position on the German center-right was considerably to the left of Bernie Sanders in the US.

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Democrats are trying to pass an anti-gerrymandering law at the federal level, while simultaneously trying to gerrymander blue states like New York and Illinois more aggressively. At a simplistic level, this looks like hypocrisy, but I think this two-pronged approach is the only way we’ll get rid of gerrymandering. As long as it’s a one-sided advantage for Republicans, they’ll be unified in protecting it.

I believe in the Designated Hitter Principle: You may think that the designated hitter is a terrible idea that mars the purity of baseball. But if you play in a league where DHs are in the rules, you put a DH in your lineup.

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Remember Andy McCabe, the guy who became acting head of the FBI after James Comey was fired, and then was fired himself just days before his scheduled retirement, so that his pension wouldn’t vest? He filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, which is now under new management. This week DoJ settled with McCabe, not admitting any wrongdoing, but giving him back his retirement benefits. “Plaintiff will be deemed to have retired from the FBI on March 19, 2018.” DoJ also pays McCabe’s attorney’s fees.

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Media Matters reports:

Nearly a dozen of the Fox News guests the network has presented as concerned parents or educators who oppose the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in schools also have day jobs as Republican strategists, conservative think-tankers, or right-wing media personalities

The article lists 11 by name, including “concerned parent” Ian Prior, who has appeared 14 times on Fox to denounce CRT, without mentioning his professional work doing communications for the RNC, Jeff Sessions, Karl Rove, and other Republicans.

Fox has been particularly focused on fanning the critical race theory pseudo-issue in Virginia, where Pears and several other astroturf voices are from, and which (coincidentally) is electing a governor in a few weeks.

and let’s close with something reassuring

You may think your expressions in photos look odd, but your face does nothing like what dogs’ faces do when they’re trying to pluck a treat out of the air.

The Pandora Papers … mostly demonstrates that the people that could end the secrecy of off-shore, end what’s going on, are themselves benefiting from it.

– Gerard Ryle,
Director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

This week’s featured post is “Pandemics Are Beaten By Communities, Not Individuals“.

This week everybody was talking about Congress

Some important stuff got done this week and other important stuff got delayed, but at least complete disaster was avoided for now.

in general, we’re still in the same situation I talked about last week: The public can see what has gotten done and what hasn’t gotten done. But the negotiations over the stuff that still needs doing are private, so we don’t really know what’s going to happen.

We’re talking about trillions of dollars and very important decisions, though, so everybody wants to know what’s going to happen. Consequently, commentators are speculating like mad. And that’s fine, as long as we all understand that none of us really know anything.

So I want to caution everybody not to get too spun up about Manchin and Sinema, or the Congressional Progressive Caucus, or the Democratic leadership, or President Biden, or whoever you plan to blame for whatever bad things you think are going to happen. Wait and see how it all comes out.

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What got done was keeping the government running until December 3. The new fiscal year began Friday, and the government did not shut down. That seems like a relatively low hurdle, but with one of the major parties committed to sabotage, it was an accomplishment.

Beyond that, stay tuned. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warns that she will run out of wiggle room later this month if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.

The new estimate from Yellen raises the risk that the United States could default on its debt in a matter of weeks if Washington fails to act. A default would likely be catastrophic, tanking markets and the economy, and delaying payments to millions of Americans.

A bill to raise the debt ceiling passed the House but was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate last Monday. Mitch McConnell insisted that “Republicans are not rooting for … a debt limit breach.” They’re just not willing to vote to prevent one as long as a Democrat is president. Democrats did not act this way during the recent Republican administration.

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And then there are the two infrastructure bills: the $1 trillion bipartisan one (which everyone is calling the BIF) that passed the Senate, and the $3.5 trillion one that Democrats want to pass via the filibuster-avoiding reconciliation process, but that Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (and a few Democrats in the House) are still not supporting.

[Note: All these numbers are over ten years, so they’re not as big as they look. We’re currently spending over $700 billion a year on defense, but we appropriate it year-by-year, so we never end up talking about a $7 trillion defense bill.]

The Manchin/Sinema faction (which isn’t very big, but doesn’t need to be with voting majorities this small) was hoping to pass the BIF first, then talk about the larger bill. So far, House progressives (with President Biden’s support) have blocked that path. (Josh Marshall points out how strangely negative the NYT’s coverage of this has been.)

Manchin wants a smaller price tag, and wants programs (free community college, for example) to be means-tested rather than general entitlements. What Sinema wants is unclear.

While I admit to not knowing any more than the other speculating commentators, I remain optimistic. All Democrats must know that they face disaster in 2022 if they can’t point to meaningful accomplishments. And whether you’re progressive or moderate, and whether you face a re-election campaign or not, you have to understand that being in the minority sucks. (If Mitch McConnell gets control of the Senate again, no one will care what Joe Manchin thinks.) So I believe they will make something happen, though I can’t predict what it will be.

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Unsurprisingly, Kevin McCarthy is lying about the infrastructure bills raising middle-class taxes.

and the pandemic

This week brought a sad milestone — the 700,000th American death — but also good news: a pill that can help you get well after you’ve been infected.

Friday, Merck announced molnupiravir. (Where do they get these names? If I’d seen that word without an explanation, I’d have guessed it was a Norse weapon like Thor’s hammer.) It’s new and hasn’t been approved yet, but the results from the trials look good.

The study tracked 775 adults with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who were considered high risk for severe disease because of health problems such as obesity, diabetes or heart disease. The results have not been reviewed by outside experts, the usual procedure for vetting new medical research.

Among patients taking molnupiravir, 7.3% were either hospitalized or died at the end of 30 days, compared with 14.1% of those getting the dummy pill. After that time period, there were no deaths among those who received the drug, compared with eight in the placebo group, according to Merck.

The breakthrough is that it’s a pill people can take at home.

All other COVID-19 treatments now authorized in the U.S. require an IV or injection. A pill taken at home, by contrast, would ease pressure on hospitals and could also help curb outbreaks in poorer and more remote corners of the world that don’t have access to the more expensive infusion therapies.

“This would allow us to treat many more people much more quickly and, we trust, much less expensively,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the research.

Experts emphasize that the best way forward is still vaccination: Prevention is better than treatment.

And like every other way to fight Covid, Merck’s pill isn’t a guarantee: 7.3% of the people who took it in the trial wound up either in the hospital or dead. (Remember: They were chosen to be a high-risk group. Your odds might be better.) So it’s best to think of molnupiravir as part of a defense-in-depth strategy: Get vaccinated. Avoid high-risk situations (like packed-in indoor crowds). Take Merck’s pill if you get sick. And if you still have to go the hospital, get monoclonal antibodies or some other IV therapy.

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The other good news is that the Delta surge really does seem to have passed its peak. In spite of hitting the 700K total, deaths per day have finally started to decline. After being above 2000 per day for two weeks, they’ve now fallen to 1878 per day. New cases are averaging 106K per day, down 28% in the last two weeks.

Strangely, the states where cases are still rising are nearly all on the Canadian border: Alaska is the worst, up 54% in two weeks, but cases are also rising in North Dakota, Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Idaho, and (just slightly) in New Hampshire.

This is weird because:

• Canada isn’t seeing a big outbreak. (Cases are down 3% in two weeks.)
• There’s not a lot of transit back and forth among our northern states. The Maine-to-Idaho region is not a thing.

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New York City’s vaccine mandate is working. In spite of scary stories about thousands and thousands of teachers who would lose their jobs rather than get vaccinated, large numbers are getting vaccinated at the last minute.

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If you’re old enough to remember the Tea Party anti-ObamaCare protests of 2009, the current anti-mask and anti-mandate protests should look familiar: School board meetings around the country are being disrupted now, the way that congressional town-hall meetings were then, by loud people who seem to represent a upswelling of grass-roots anger. The disinformation, the over-the-top accusations of tyranny, the air of menace — it’s all pretty similar.

Coincidentally, the same people turn out to be funding and organizing it on a national level. Once again, they’re providing the disinformation and the tactics that allow a relatively small number of folks to look like a national movement.

The letter sounds passionate and personal. … But the heartfelt appeal is not the product of a grass roots groundswell. Rather, it is a template drafted and circulated this week within a conservative network built on the scaffolding of the Koch fortune and the largesse of other GOP megadonors.

The template is being distributed by the Independent Women’s Forum. But who are they, exactly?

As a nonprofit, Independent Women’s Forum is exempt from disclosing its donors and paying federal income taxes. But the group, which reported revenue of nearly $3.8 million in 2019, has drawn financial and institutional support from organizations endowed by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his late brother, David, according to private promotional materials as well as tax records and other public statements.

Tributes to sponsors prepared for recent galas — and reviewed by The Post — recognize the Charles Koch Institute as a major benefactor. Other backers include Facebook; Dick DeVos, heir to the Amway fortune and the husband of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; and the Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropy controlled by the family that founded Walmart.

Another similarity to the Obama era: Patrician conservatives don’t care if their plebian followers die. Back then, Koch organizations campaigned to get people to refuse ObamaCare, even if they couldn’t afford health insurance without it. That campaign undoubtedly killed people, just like this one is killing people.

and the Pandora Papers

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has a new treasure trove of leaked documents outlining how the rich and powerful hide their money. You can think of this YouTube video as a trailer for the more detailed revelations that started showing up today on the ICIJ’s web site and in newspapers like The Washington Post.

I have a friend who’s been working on this project, but he’s been taking confidentiality seriously, so as of this morning I didn’t know any details.

but I want to tell you about a book

This week I read Forget the Alamo, which I found enormously entertaining.

The short version is that everything you think you know about the Alamo is wrong. The Texas Revolution wasn’t about escaping Mexican tyranny, it was about preserving slavery. Sam Houston’s army was seeded with American military “deserters”, who mostly went unpunished after they returned to their units. (That kind of resembles what Putin has been doing in eastern Ukraine.) The Alamo wasn’t a strategically significant battle where brave Texans voluntarily sacrificed their lives; William Travis just didn’t take Santa Anna’s advance seriously until it was too late to retreat. Davy Crockett didn’t go down swinging his rifle after he ran out of ammunition, as he does in the movies, but most likely surrendered and was executed. And so on.

In addition to the pure satisfaction of dispelling historical myths, the authors manage to take history seriously while still writing in an engaging style. Take this passage for example:

[Davy Crockett’s] arrival at the Alamo is one of history’s great juxtapositional flukes, as if Teddy Roosevelt or Mark Twain had darted onto the Titanic at the last minute.

In the early 1830s, Texas was where an American Southerner went after screwing up so badly that he had to disappear from somewhere else. So the backstories of all the major characters are fascinating.

After the battle, there’s the progress of the myth, which had an open field because there were no survivors to contradict tall tales. (“Ahem,” say Mexican soldiers.) What developed was what the authors call the Heroic Anglo Narrative, which served to terrorize generations of Hispanic Texan seventh-graders. (One Tejano compares “The Mexicans killed Davy Crockett” to “The Jews killed Jesus.”)

In addition to the historical detail, the book is a running meditation on the stories we tell each other, why we believe them, and what they say about us.

and you also might be interested in …

On my religious blog, I explained why “Male and female he created them” in Genesis shouldn’t be read as a divine establishment of binary gender.

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The partisan hacks at the Supreme Court continue to be deeply offended that so many people think they’re partisan hacks. Samuel Alito, who continues to be my least favorite justice even after Trump’s three appointments, is the latest one to object.

Senator Whitehouse parodies Alito’s argument:

“Nope, just random that we churned out 80 partisan 5-4 decisions for Republican donors, opened dark money floodgates, crippled Voting Rights Act, unleashed partisan bulk gerrymandering, and protected corporations from court. Pure coincidence.”

Alito makes the bottom of my list due to his consistency. Other justices (Thomas, say) may at times have more bizarre opinions. But they also have ideological quirks that make them at least a little unpredictable. If you want to know where Alito will stand, though, you just need to ask three questions:

• Which side of a case increases Republican political power?
• Which side increases big business’ power over workers and consumers?
• Which side lines up best with Catholic dogma?

Unless those answers point in different directions — and they almost never do — you know what Alito’s position is.

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Here in the US, we’re running into a few supply chain problems, but it’s nothing compared to what’s going on in the UK, where there is plenty of gasoline at refineries and terminals, but very little getting into people’s cars. The bottleneck seems to have something to do with all the truck drivers from various EU countries who went home after Brexit took effect.

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Germany had a close election last week, and everybody is just moving on without lawsuits or riots or anything. Weird, isn’t it?

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Bright red Idaho is the latest state to refute Trump’s Big Lie. A document circulated by My-Pillow-guy Mike Lindell alleged votes were switched electronically from Trump to Biden in all 44 of Idaho’s counties, and listed county-by-county what the vote totals should have been. (Why anyone would bother to perpetrate this fraud remains a mystery, since it didn’t come close to flipping the state.)

Idaho officials immediately noticed that 7 of their counties don’t have electronic vote-counting at any stage in their process, describing this as “a huge red flag” in Lindell’s claim. So they recounted the two smallest counties by hand, and found exactly the same number of Biden votes as the original count. (Trump lost a few.)

When confronted with this complete refutation of his claim, Lindell did the same thing the Cyber Ninjas did in Arizona: moved the goalposts to say that the problem was with the ballots, not the counting. “The ballots themselves are not real people.”

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In spite of his somewhat snide tone, Ross Douthat makes an interesting point. From a 20-year perspective, liberals have been quite successful: Bush-style military interventionism is no longer popular, the push to limit and privatize programs like Social Security was turned back and reversed, and alternatives to one-man-one-woman sexuality are now widely accepted.

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Conservative rhetoric seems to be timeless. I ran across this quote in the book Freedom: an unruly history by Annelien de Dijn (which I will say more about after I finish it). Cato the Elder, speaking in 195 BC in favor of an anti-luxury law that the women of Rome wanted to see repealed (because it specially targeted women’s jewelry), warned against allowing women to have a voice in government:

The moment they begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors.

We still hear that point today from every overprivileged class, directed at every underprivileged class. Whether the subject is women, people of color, non-Christians, gays and lesbians, non-English speakers, transfolk, or what have you, the message is the same: There’s no such thing as equality. So if men, Whites, Christians et al. stop being the masters, they’ll become the slaves.

In spite of Cato’s efforts, the Lex Oppia was repealed. But Rome never did become a matriarchy. In more than two thousand years of testing, Cato’s they’ll-take-over theory has never proved out. And yet we still hear it.

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Alex Jones has lost two lawsuits filed by parents of children who died in the Sandy Hook massacre. Jones repeatedly charged on his popular InfoWars radio/YouTube show that the massacre was a “false flag operation”, and that the parents were “crisis actors” whose children did not die. In addition to causing the families emotional distress, Jones’ charges led some of his listeners to verbally abuse the parents or make threats against them.

Jones lost the lawsuits by default when he refused to cooperate with the court’s discovery process by providing documents, an action the judge described as “flagrant bad faith”. A jury will now determine the damages he owes the parents.

and let’s close with something musical

A commenter pointed out that last week’s closing wasn’t “recent” at all. The Helsinki complaint chorus video was posted in 2006, which I should have noticed. This week’s closing, “The Sounds of Starbucks” sounds like the result of a pandemic depression, but was posted in 2018.