The Weekly Sift

Like a Russian nesting doll of fuck-ups

– Jeremy Konyndyk, former USAID official
on Trump’s foreign-aid freeze

This week’s featured post is “Campaign or Movement?“

This week everybody was talking about tariffs

After long threatening tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China, Trump ordered tariffs on Saturday: 10% tariffs on China and energy imports from Canada, 25% tariffs on Mexico and non-energy imports from Canada. The tariffs take effect tomorrow.

It’s always hard to know what Trump’s true intentions are, so it’s possible some deal to avoid the tariffs might be worked out before they take effect. Ostensibly, the reason for the tariffs is that the three countries aren’t doing enough to prevent fentanyl from being smuggled into the US. So if there’s even a fig leaf’s worth of progress on that issue, Trump could cancel the order and declare victory. [Sure enough: The Mexican tariffs have already been paused for a month.]

If not, Canada has already announced its reprisals. Mexico has pledged to retaliate, but so far I haven’t seen specifics.

and Musk’s takeover of government systems

Much of Trump’s first two weeks has consisted of the new administration puffing up to look bigger and more powerful than it actually is under the law. For example, Trump confidently cancelled the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship without having any authority to do so. His government spending “freeze” was promptly unfrozen by two federal judges — again, because it is not based on any legal authority. (Once Congress has appropriated money, the executive branch has a responsibility to spend it as directed.)

But simultaneously, important things are happening in the shadows, with even members of Congress puzzled about what is going on. It’s hard to get clear information, but it seems that private-sector employees of Elon Musk’s companies have been inducted into his DOGE department, and have been taking over major government computer systems. Wired reported Wednesday on Musk’s takeover of the computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government’s HR department. Other Musk loyalists have taken control of the payment system at the Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service. BFS writes $6 trillion of checks each year. Still others have captured the General Services Administration.

It’s not clear what kinds of abuse Musk intends, but using the BFS payments system he could do his own version of impoundment: simply kill the checks paying for any program he disapproves of. Conversely, Matt Yglesias suggests a different use:

— Appropriations lapse in March, government shutdown
— But DOGE just illegally keeps paying the bills Trump believes should be paid

A fourth agency Musk has taken over is USAID, which oversees foreign aid grants. Musk has declared USAID “beyond repair” and says he intends to shut it down. His legal authority to do this is, well, zero.

DOGE was established by executive order two weeks ago, and given the mission to modernize “Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity”. I don’t see how you get from there to shutting down an agency established by Congress. USAID’s security officers tried to prevent DOGE employees from getting access to systems with sensitive and perhaps classified information, but those officials were then put on administrative leave.

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On his blog Doomsday Scenario, Garrett Graf imagines how our press would cover this if it were happening in a Third World country “Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government“.

What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.

With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. … The G-7 country’s newly installed president, a mid-level oligarch named Donald Trump, appeared amid Musk’s moves to be increasingly merely a figurehead head of state.

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The freeze on money for states was set aside by two judges, but the freeze on foreign aid grants apparently stands, with potentially deadly results.

Some of these grants fund NGOs in third-world countries where a little money can mean the difference between life and death.

Among the programs that remain grounded as of Friday: emergency medical care for displaced Palestinians and Yemenis fleeing war, heat and electricity for Ukrainian refugees and HIV treatment and mpox surveillance in Africa.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports on two other programs on hold. One is working on malaria vaccines, and the other studies drugs for HIV prevention.

Some products, such as injectable HIV prevention drugs, are not yet available outside research settings, he said, leaving participants with no alternative source to continue treatment.

If the level of drugs in a participant’s body falls to nonprotective levels, it not only puts them at risk of infection, but means their infection is more likely to develop drug resistance. That makes their treatment more complicated, and if they then infect someone else, the resistance will spread.

Ostensibly, the freeze is just 90 days, so that the programs can be reviewed by Trump appointees. But there appears to be no mechanism for a review to take place.

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One example of abuse is in the all-government emails that have been coming from OPM. One (I know somebody who got it, and then saw it reported) announced a “mandate” that all federal employees return to the office five days a week. It offered a “deferred resignation” option for people who didn’t want to come in: Simply by replying to the email with “resign”, an employee could continue to be paid until September, when the resignation would take effect. Major media falsely characterized this as a “buyout” offer.

From top to bottom, this email had no legal authority behind it. Work-from-home options are written into several ongoing union contracts, which nameless minions inside the Trump administration — or even Trump himself — have no power to cancel. So there is no legal across-the-board return-to-the-office mandate.

There also is no “buyout” offer. The OPM email doesn’t say the resigning workers get to stop working, only that they won’t have to come into the office. It doesn’t say they can’t be fired before September. And the money to pay them has not been authorized. (The whole government is only funded through March 14.)

So the memo basically has no legal content. It makes an unauthorized threat and offers an unauthorized escape from that threat.

and plane crashes

Wednesday, an Army helicopter and an American Eagle jetliner collided over the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport in D.C. Trump promptly repeated the pattern I pointed out three weeks ago: Despite the fact that he knew nothing about the actual causes of the crash, he blamed it on his political enemies. Rather than turn tragedy into a unifying national experience of sorrow and grief, he turned it into a divisive experience of finger-pointing and misinformation.

This time the culprit was DEI: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. His implication was that somebody somewhere in this tragedy wasn’t a White man, and that it all could have been prevented if that particular position had been filled by a White man.

All the Trump acolytes — J. D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, etc. — echoed his sentiments, with Trump Jr. bragging that the new administration puts “merit ahead of skin color”. What’s really laughable about this is that no merit-based system would produce a Vice President Vance or Defense Secretary Hegseth. Both of these men are completely unqualified for the jobs they hold, and it’s impossible to imagine a woman or a person of color being chosen with so little relevant experience.

and you also might be interested in …

Another Trump order that is being challenged in court relates to his order insisting there are only two sexes. One consequence of this order is that transwomen in federal prison have to be reclassified as men and moved to a men’s facility. The danger of rape and other brutalization should be obvious.

One such prisoner has succeeded in getting a court to block her transfer, and rights organizations have filed a second case covering three women.

and let’s close with some getaways

Can’t manage a vacation right now? Check out “The 20 Most Beautiful Places on Planet Earth” in this video.

No sift next week. The next new posts will appear on January 27.

From what I can tell, the manager of your local Applebee’s has more experience managing a bigger budget and more personnel than Pete Hegseth.

– Senator Tammy Duckworth

This week’s featured post is “A Disastrous Development in Our Response to Disasters“.

This week everybody was talking about the LA wildfires

As I write, the fires in the the Los Angeles area are still burning, driven by dry conditions and hurricane-force winds. A weekly blog is not the right way to cover breaking news, so I won’t offer anything more than a few observations.

Fires driven by such strong winds don’t look real; it’s like somebody has speeded up the video.

The problem wasn’t only a shortage of manpower. Even the most formidable human efforts are useless when bone-dry undergrowth is whipped by the strongest winds the area has experienced in years, with gusts up to 100 mph. “When that wind is howling like that, nothing’s going to stop that fire,” says Wayne Coulson, CEO of the aerial firefighting company Coulson Aviation that’s battling the fires. “You just need to get out of the way.”

The New York Magazine article that quote is taken from gives some context:

Historically, the danger of wildfire has waned with the arrival of winter rains, but in recent years that pattern has changed. “On average, California’s rainy season is occurring about a month later than it did historically,” Swain says. And that increases both the length and the potential intensity of the fire season. By this time of year L.A. normally should have received several inches of rain, but it’s only gotten a fifth of an inch since last July, making the period the second-driest in over a century of record-keeping.

The trend isn’t limited to Southern California. Climate change has increased the number and severity of wildfires around the world, with higher global temperatures leading to drier weather in some regions. The Russian arctic, which hadn’t historically been prone to wildfire, has started to experience it on an epic scale, while southeastern Australia is burning with new intensity. Europe, too, has seen a steady increase in wildfires. Last year’s wildfires in Canada choked the eastern U.S. in smoke and painted the daytime red.

This is something to bear in mind whenever someone makes the argument that programs to cut fossil fuel use are expensive or uneconomical. Fossil fuels are a false economy. The reason we keep having these increasingly expensive disasters is that we have burned too much “cheap” fossil fuel. And yes, the money we spend subsidizing electric cars or installing solar panels this year won’t lessen our risk of climate-related disasters next year; there’s way more lag time in the system than that. But refusing to change at all is going to be much expensive in the 10-20 year time frame.

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Republicans may not believe in climate change, but insurance companies do. Why aren’t the wealthy climate change deniers funding new insurance companies to take advantage of established companies pulling out of Florida and other climate-threatened places?

As Noah Smith points out, climate change doesn’t just increase risk, it breaks the whole model of insurance. Statistically, fire insurance works because house fires are usually uncorrelated: The insurance company can deal with one person’s house burning down, because it is still getting premiums from all the other houses in the neighborhood. But when the whole neighborhood burns down at once, the company could be in trouble.

and Jimmy Carter

Carter deserved better than to have his funeral driven out of the headlines by a natural disaster, especially one caused by climate change. If all world leaders had followed Carter’s lead in taking climate change seriously, that disaster might not have happened at all.

It’s hard not to pair Carter’s funeral with Trump’s looming inauguration. Americans used to value decency and virtue in their leaders, but on the whole we no longer do.

and Trump’s legal issues

Despite a flurry of legal filings, Trump was unable to prevent being sentenced for his 34 felony convictions. His sentence amounts to approximately nothing, but his convictions stand. A week from today he will enter office as the first convicted felon to become president.

While this is a victory of sorts for the rule of law, it also shows how close we are to being a government of men, not of laws. There was no real legal reason to block his sentencing, but four Supreme Court justices wanted to anyway. Trump’s argument was based on expanding the reasoning of the Court’s immunity decision, which similarly had no legal basis beyond the Court’s partisan makeup.

It is notable, however, that even in this low-stakes dispute, four justices dissented. That suggests there is strong support within the Court for reading the July immunity decision very broadly. And, of course, if any one of the five justices in the majority should flip their vote, Trump will prevail the next time this dispute arrives on the Supreme Court’s doorstep.

Two days before that decision, Trump and Justice Alito spoke on the phone.

Alito said in a statement that the two did not discuss the case or any others involving Trump. He said they talked about William Levi, Alito’s former law clerk, and if he was qualified for a potential position in Trump’s administration.

Alito says this as if his excuse makes the call OK. It doesn’t. Quite the opposite, giving Alito’s former clerk a position in his administration could be considered a favor. Alito, of course, was one of the four justices who wanted to block Trump’s sentencing.

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Other legal maneuvers attempted to block release of Jack Smith’s report. How that will play out is still up in the air. Obviously, if Trump can run out the clock until his inauguration, he can block release of the report himself. He’s hoping to use the courts to do that.

and his fantasies of conquest

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m having a hard time taking seriously Trump’s threats against Panama, Greenland, and Canada. I think he’s trying to burnish his image as a strong man, because his weakness is about to be exposed. In The Atlantic, Robert Kagan considers the possibility that Ukraine will fall in the next 12-18 months without more aid from the US.

When Trump said during his campaign that he could end the war in 24 hours, he presumably believed what most observers believed: that Putin needed a respite, that he was prepared to offer peace in exchange for territory, and that a deal would include some kind of security guarantee for whatever remained of Ukraine. Because Trump’s peace proposal at the time was regarded as such a bad deal for Kyiv, most assumed Putin would welcome it. Little did they know that the deal was not remotely bad enough for Putin to accept. So now Trump is in the position of having promised a peace deal that he cannot possibly get without forcing Putin to recalculate.

Kagan puts his finger on the key point: Losing Ukraine weakens America in the eyes of the world. It’s the exact opposite of America becoming “great again”.

The liberal world order is inseparable from American power, and not just because it depends on American power. America itself would not be so powerful without the alliances and the open international economic and political system that it built after World War II to protect its long-term interests. Trump can’t stop defending the liberal world order without ceding significantly greater influence to Russia and China. Like Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and Ali Khamenei see the weakening of America as essential to their own ambitions. Trump may share their hostility to the liberal order, but does he also share their desire to weaken America and, by extension, himself?

Trump has boxed himself in. The only way to make Putin respect his “strength” is to push a massive new Ukraine aid package through Congress, which is the exact opposite of what his MAGA base wants.

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Trump keeps moving the goal posts. During the campaign, Trump said he would solve the Ukraine War in 24 hours. Now his point man on the issue is saying 100 days.

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Tuesday, Don Jr. and assorted MAGA influencers like Charlie Kirk went to Greenland for a photo op with “supporters” of the idea that Greenland should join the United States. But later it turned out that the photo op was staged.

Danish media reported Thursday that a series of photos featuring Kirk and Greenlandic residents in MAGA hats was staged. The MAGA cohort reportedly rounded up homeless people from the area—including one person from under a bridge—promising them a meal at the Hotel Hans Egede in exchange for their participation in the pro-Trump photo circuit.

Videos of the trip that circulated on X describe the Greenlandic participants as “the local community in Nuuk,” but several local sources that spoke with DR News described the photographed individuals as “homeless and socially disadvantaged” people who are often outside the supermarket directly across from the hotel where the Trump event was held.

“All they have to do is put on a cap and be in the Trump staff’s videos. They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful,” Tom Amtoft, a 28-year resident of Nuuk, told the Danish news outlet.

Trump has floated the idea of using tariffs against tiny Denmark to force the Danes to hand over Greenland. However, Denmark is part of the European Union, so tariffs targeting Denmark would mean a trade war with the whole continent.

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Here’s the best response to Trump’s proposal to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

and you also might be interested in …

The Biden administration’s last jobs report is stunningly good. 256K new jobs, unemployment falling to 4.1%. Paul Krugman assembles statistics on the health of the economy overall, and comments

the fact that [Trump] inherits an economy in such good shape is actually a problem for his agenda

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A statistical analysis in The Lancet claims deaths in Gaza have been underestimated.

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Elon Musk is moving the goal posts: Previously he said he’d find “at least $2 trillion” to cut in the federal budget. He now claims there’s “a good shot” at cutting $1 trillion.

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In some alternative timeline:

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The feud within MAGA is real. Here’s Steve Bannon commenting on Elon Musk:

He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. … I will have Elon Musk run out of here by inauguration day. He will not have full access to the White House. He will be like any other person.

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Speaking of Elon, his X platform has turned into a great place to spread racism.

There have been several reports of the newest Grok update being used to create photo realistic racist imagery of several football players and managers. One image depicts a player, who is black, picking cotton while another shows that same player eating a banana surrounded by monkeys in a forest. A separate image depicts two different players as pilots in a plane’s cockpit with the twin towers in the background. More images depict a variety of players and managers meeting and conversing with controversial historical figures such as Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Callum Hood, the head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), said X had become a platform that incentivised and rewarded spreading hate through revenue sharing, and AI imagery made that even easier.

“The thing that X has done, to a degree that no other mainstream platform has done, is to offer cash incentives to accounts to do this, so accounts on X are very deliberately posting the most naked hate and disinformation possible.”

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The price of political influence in the Trump administration is rising faster than the price of eggs. Want face time with Trump and his VP on Inauguration Day? It will cost you twice as much as it would have in 2017.

To get access to the candlelight dinner with Trump and the vice-president’s dinner with Vance, donors would need to have contributed at the $1m level. A $500,000 contribution would limit access to only the candlelight dinner, unlike in 2017 when it was enough for both.

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Here’s the central problem with the idea that “drill baby drill” will lower the price of energy (and eventually everything else”): We have a lot of oil and gas in the ground, but we don’t have a lot of cheap oil and gas in the ground. Every time the price goes down, more and more potential drilling sites become unprofitable.

Case in point: Wednesday, the Interior Department held an auction for drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — and had no bidders.

The sale, which was required by Congress, marks the second time in four years that an effort to auction oil and gas leases in the pristine wilderness — home to migrating caribou, polar bears, musk oxen, millions of birds and other wildlife — has been a flop.

The repeated failures suggest that oil companies are either not interested in drilling in the refuge or do not think it’s worth the cost, despite insistence by Mr. Trump and many Republican lawmakers that the refuge should be opened up for drilling.

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Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox News for lying about its software’s performance during the 2020 election is still alive. Fox settled a similar suit by paying Dominion Voting Systems $787 million in 2023.

Imagine if everyone Fox has lied about had the deep pockets of a major corporation.

and let’s close with something colorful

The Guardian published an unusual year-in-review piece: 2024’s best photos of the Northern Lights.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

“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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

Can you read this graffiti?
Can you decode this information?
Can you work out what they’re saying to you?
Can you read the signs yet?

Can you feel the real intention?
Can you discern the subtle meaning?
Can you see all the implications?
Can you read the signs yet?

– Shriekback, “Signs” (1992)

This week’s featured post is “Should Democrats Abandon the Trans Community?“.

This week everybody was talking about Matt Gaetz

Thursday, Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration as attorney general. This is worth celebrating in its own right, but also for a larger reason: It shows that Trump isn’t a dictator yet. Or, as Amanda Marcotte puts it: Resistance is not futile.

The nomination battles are all part of a larger question: Now that the Republicans have a Senate majority — 53-47 after Bob Casey’s concession in Pennsylvania — will the Senate continue to be an independent branch of government? During the Biden administration (or any previous American administration of either party) the answer was obviously Yes. How many times, for example, did Biden have to negotiate with Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema to get some part of his program passed? He couldn’t simply demand that they get into line.

But MAGA is an authoritarian movement with no principles beyond whatever its Leader wants. It dominates the Republican Party, so it’s an open question whether the GOP has also become an authoritarian movement. Many claim that it has, and that if you were elected as a Republican, you were elected to obey Trump. Last week, Texas Congressman Troy Nehls said as much:

If Donald Trump says “jump 3 feet high and scratch your head.” We all jump 3 feet high and scratch our heads.

I can’t picture Joe Manchin doing that for Biden.

Come January, Republicans will control the Senate, so has the Senate also been assimilated into Trump’s authoritarian machine? Trump’s cabinet nominations, the worst of which I discussed last week, have raised that question: If the Leader can make you agree that Matt Gaetz should be the top American law enforcement officer, or approve RFK Jr. as the primary shaper of federal health policy, what can’t he make you do?

For the moment, at least, the answer seems to be that the Senate will retain some limited amount of independence. We got a hint of that on November 13, when the Republican Senate caucus elected John Thune as majority leader, rather than Trump’s choice Rick Scott. The Gaetz withdrawal (in the face of repeated leaks about orgies where underage girls were paid to participate) is a second sign. Trump was apparently unable to make senators repeat Gaetz’s denials and continue supporting him.

Admittedly, that’s a low bar. But it establishes that there IS a limit — something we didn’t know a week ago. What happens to the rest of Trump’s nominees will give us a better idea where that limit is.

The NYT’s Michelle Cottle warns that this is just the beginning:

[Trump’s] M.O. is to relentlessly pressure-test people and institutions. Those who don’t crumble at first are hit again. And again. The goal is to shatter the resisters’ spines, one vertebra at a time if necessary, so that they don’t just bow before him but rather collapse in a gelatinous blob. Like, say, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

A related point that I hope Republican senators bear in mind: You can never prove your loyalty once and for all. Whatever you offer, he will keep asking for more. If you have any line you won’t cross, he will eventually try to push you past it — and reject you if you hold, as he did with Mike Pence. No VP was ever more loyal than Pence, but it wasn’t enough. There is no “enough”.

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Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley has no current position and no direct power, but I think it’s meaningful that she criticized both DNI nominee Tulsi Gabbard and HHS nominee RFK Jr. on her radio show. Ultimately, I doubt her resistance will amount to much, but she is demonstrating that Republicans do not automatically have to bend the knee to whatever Trump does.

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Trump wasted no time naming a new AG nominee: Pam Bondi. There is things not to like about her as well, but at least she has some qualifications: 20 years as a prosecutor and 8 years as Florida’s attorney general. We can hope she doesn’t have Gaetz-level baggage.

Trump wants his AG is to make the Department of Justice into the partisan weapon he has falsely claimed it was under Biden. (Every DoJ investigation of Trump began with probable cause, and the indictments against him were well supported with evidence. I will have no problems with Bondi investigating or indicting Trump’s rivals or critics if she upholds those standards.) The question to raise with Bondi is how she will respond when her President tweets that so-and-so should be in jail, as he often does.

The signs on this issue are not good. In 2023, Bondi said on Fox News:

At DoJ, the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated.

Joyce Vance suggests another question: Did Trump lose the 2020 election?

Unless her answer is yes, the Senate must reject her nomination. You can’t be an election denier & the attorney general.

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Trump’s “landslide” win continues to shrink. He got less than half the popular vote.

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Trump still hasn’t signed the documents that officially begin the transition process. That would unlock federal funding, allow Biden officials to share sensitive information with their prospective replacements, and let the FBI begin background investigations of Trump’s appointees.

What’s the holdup? Transparency. Trump would have to reveal who’s been funding his transition efforts to date, and would open his incoming administration to conflict-of-interest considerations.

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The night before Gaetz withdrew, a panel on MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour” discussed the most recent sexual revelations and how Gaetz’s nomination probably wasn’t tenable any more. One panelist said, “I do agree. He will probably have to pull out. Excuse me, that’s a bad choice of words.”

The panel erupted into laughter and host Stephanie Ruhle quickly went to commercial.

and whether Democrats should abandon the trans community

That’s covered in the featured post. Spoiler: I think not.

and Netanyahu’s indictment

From Vox:

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has formally issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif for war crimes and crimes against humanity. … The warrants accuse Gallant and Netanyahu of violating the laws of international armed conflict by intentionally depriving civilians in Gaza of “food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity” by consistently blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza. They also accuse both men of intentionally directing attacks against civilians in Gaza in at least two instances. Deif is also accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, torture, and sexual violence.

Naturally, Israel is not going to turn its own government officials over to the ICC for trial, and Deif may not even be alive. So the immediate effect is more of a nuisance than a threat: Any time he wants to travel outside Israel, Netanyahu will have to make sure that the countries he passes through aren’t planning to arrest him. 124 countries are treaty-bound to arrest him, though some have announced they won’t. The US has never officially recognized the ICC, and President Biden has called the indictment “outrageous”, so Netanyahu should be safe to come here. (If his plane has to make an emergency landing in the EU or Canada, though, there could be a problem.)

The warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant could also complicate weapons transfers from European states and nations with laws limiting transfers in situations in which there’s credible reason to believe a country will use them to commit atrocities.

“We’ve already seen a Dutch court saying that the Netherlands cannot send fighter jet [parts], for example, to Israel. We’ve seen the termination or expiration of various arms contracts that the UK had,” said Kelebogile Zvobgo, professor of government at the College of William & Mary.

and the federal budget

Elon Musk’s DOGE is about to barrage us with disinformation about federal spending. Paul Krugman pre-bunks a bunch of it with the following graph, showing that federal employment has not significantly increased since the 1950s. (Those little blips at 10-year-intervals must be census employees.)

Don Moynihan covers some of the same information, and notes that the entire federal civilian payroll is about $271 billion per year. So firing all of them would be just a drop in the bucket on the way to the $2 trillion annual savings Musk is promising. Moynihan then explains what the government does spend money on.

Where do you think Musk can find his $2 trillion, if not in Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest we owe on existing debt?

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Elon has started identifying individual government workers for harassment.

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We’re also going to be hearing a lot of nonsense about taxes in the coming months, as Congress deals with the expiration of the tax cuts from Trump’s first term. Here’s some nonsense Don Jr. retweeted:

Replace the US tax code’s 7000 pages and millions of word with a simple flat tax. It could fit into a few pages of simple English, making paying taxes simple and enforcement even simpler.

I’m guessing that neither Don Jr. nor the guy who originally posted this have ever done their own taxes. If they had, they would know that progressive tax rates add almost no complexity to the process, so making everybody pay the same rate would not simplify anything. What’s complicated is defining income. Once you’ve determined your taxable income, you just look up your tax on a table.

What makes defining income so tricky? Rich people like the Trumps who hire smart accountants to seek out every possible trick for hiding income. If everybody could be trusted to report their income fairly and accurately, the tax code could indeed be much shorter and simpler.

Bottom line: Flat taxes are not simpler. Period. All they do is shift the tax burden from the rich to everybody else.

If anybody honestly wants to make taxes simpler, I have a suggestion: treat dividends and capital gains the same as wages. If all forms of income were equal, I wouldn’t have to fill out the Dividend and Capital Gain worksheet, which is one of the most annoying parts of filing my taxes, and where I’m most likely to make mistakes. But of course, that change would hurt the rich rather than help them, so it will never go anywhere.

and long-term Democratic strategy

If you’ve gotten tired of hearing about how you need to work harder to understand and empathize with Trump voters, I have a conversation for you: David Roberts interviewing Dan Savage on his Volts blog.

At first glance, they seem like an unlikely pair to discuss long-term Democratic strategy: Volts mostly focuses on sustainable power and electrification, and if you have heard of Savage, you probably probably associate him with LGBTQ issues. But Roberts has Savage on to discuss “The Urban Archipelago“, an article Savage was responsible for when he was an editor at Seattle’s weekly alternative newspaper The Stranger two decades ago. (The current Democratic mood is remarkably similar to the post-2004 election mood, a comparison that also comes up in the featured post.)

It’s time to state something that we’ve felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America.

Republicans have long celebrated their identification with rural and small-town America (which Sarah Palin dubbed “real America“), and they openly run against America’s cities — not just Washington DC, but against all the cities. Democrats, by contrast, have never embraced their urban identity, or made the case that “San Francisco values” are admirable values. “The Urban Archipelago” claimed that they should.

[T]he challenge for the Democrats is not just to organize in the blue areas but to grow them. And to do that, Democrats need to pursue policies that encourage urban growth (mass transit, affordable housing, city services), and Democrats need to openly and aggressively champion urban values. By focusing on the cities the Dems can create a tribal identity to combat the white, Christian, rural, and suburban identity that the Republicans have cornered.

The Stranger apparently was (and maybe still is) one of those in-your-face alternative papers, so the article contains a lot of statements like:

To red-state voters, to the rural voters, residents of small, dying towns, and soulless sprawling exburbs, we say this: Fuck off. Your issues are no longer our issues. We’re going to battle our bleeding-heart instincts and ignore pangs of misplaced empathy.

It’s a little bit different from all those we-must-try-harder-to-understand-Trump-voters articles. This is much more like: If the morons in West Virginia want to let mining companies turn their state into a polluted wasteland, let them. If they want to rebel against vax mandates by letting their kids get polio, let them. It’s not our problem.

So Roberts and Savage look at the last 20 years and lament the missed opportunities. In particular, they lament the unwillingness of Democratic governments at the state and local level to build dense housing or expand mass transit into the suburbs and exurbs, with the result that city living has become prohibitively expensive, especially for the working class. NIMBYism among single-family homeowners combined with anti-gentrification and anti-growth sentiment among urban progressives has prevented the creation of the dense, liveable neighborhoods you can find in European cities like Hamburg or Berlin.

(Roberts and Savage make a simple observation: If rich people want to move into Seattle or Nashville, they will. And if new housing isn’t being built, they’ll outbid the lower classes for the housing available.)

By limiting the opportunity to live in cities, Democrats have failed to promote the lessons that come from urban life: that it’s not enough to be a rugged individual, that you have to tolerate and work together with people different from you, and that immigrants and Muslims and transfolk aren’t demons, they’re people you see every day on the subway.

One line to remember from this conversation: For Democrats, city building is party building.

and you also might be interested in …

DoJ has proposed its remedies in response to a court decision last August that Google had an illegal monopoly on internet search.

The proposals filed to a Washington federal court include the forced sale of the Chrome browser and a five-year ban from entering the browser market; a block on paying third parties such as Apple to make Google the default search engine on their products; and divestment of the Android mobile operating system if the initial proposals do not work.

I believe this case was undertaken in good faith, but you don’t have to be Nostradamus to see where things go from here: Google will adjust its algorithms to favor Trump, and the case will be dropped.

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Remember during the campaign when Trump denied that he had anything to do with Project 2025? He just nominated the head of Project 2025 to be his budget director.

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Republicans are already feeling better about the state of the economy. By Inauguration Day, they’ll be back to saying it’s “the best economy ever”, even if nothing actually changes.

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Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro has been indicted for plotting a coup after he lost the 2022 election. Now we’ll get to see how another democracy handles this problem.

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Louisiana Republicans have just shifted their tax burden downward: They cut personal and corporate income taxes, and “balanced” it with an increase in the state sales tax, which even the poorest people end up paying.

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The BlueSky migration continues. Here’s an article by somebody who understands the details better than I do.

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The season of humility begins: The Washington Post has published its list of 50 notable fiction and nonfiction books of 2024. Illiterate schlub that I am, I have read none of them.

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How bad has the UK been governed since 2008? This bad.

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61 years ago yesterday, it was Sunday afternoon and I was 7 years old. My grandfather had recently died, so the grownups were in my grandmother’s kitchen, probably trying to work out what she should do next. I was considered too young to be in that conversation, so they parked me in her living room in front of the TV.

That’s how I watched Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald — live, as it was happening. I ran out into the kitchen telling people that somebody had just shot Oswald. The grownups patiently explained to me that nobody had shot Oswald, Oswald had shot Kennedy. Then they sent me back out to the living room to face reality by myself.

This was one of my formative experiences as a journalist.

and let’s close with something a little too accurate

From The New Yorker: