The big news this week was the Supreme Court’s refusal to block Texas’ abortion-banning law. This was a backhanded way to subvert Roe v Wade, and other red states are already moving to copy Texas. There’s a lot to say about this situation — legally, politically, and socially — and there is no shortage of people already writing about it.
With that in mind, I have decided to take this blog’s name literally and do some sifting. Rather than write a long essay of my own, I’m pulling together what other people are saying as concisely as I can. So the featured post will be “[N] Observations about Abortion, Texas, and the Supreme Court”. N is currently up to 12, and I think I may stop there. The post should be out shortly.
Restoring the Roe rights is now another thing Democrats could do, if not for the filibuster. The weekly summary will make a list of these costs of the filibuster.
The summary will also examine the growing number of examples of Republican leaders embracing gangsterism and violence, including Kevin McCarthy threatening telecommunication companies with vague consequences if they cooperate with the investigation of January 6, and Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s threat of “bloodshed” if elections “continue to be stolen”. (Since no elections have been stolen, Democrats can’t avoid this bloodshed by not stealing them. But they could avoid it by not winning, which seems to be Cawthorn’s point.)
Hurricane Ida ravaging the Gulf coast makes this week’s Covid numbers hard to interpret. (Reported infections on the coast are down, but what does that mean?) The summary will include a few other odds and ends, before closing with a more kinetic variation on the domino principle: stick bomb explosions. That should be out before noon.
To state the obvious: There was no good way to lose Afghanistan to the Taliban. A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one. Either way, there was no hope of an end to the war that didn’t reveal our decades of folly, no matter how deeply America’s belief in its own enduring innocence demanded one.
Tomorrow is President Biden’s deadline for getting American forces out of Afghanistan. The US announced yesterday that it was ending its airlift of Afghans from the Kabul airport. It estimates that about 250 Americans are still to be removed, plus the forces protecting the airport, and that around 280 Americans have decided to stay for now. (Don’t ask me what they’re thinking.) 117,000 people, most of them Afghans, have been airlifted out of Afghanistan since August 14.
The Taliban has largely cooperated with this effort, but a suicide bomber from a rival Islamist group, ISIS-K, killed 180 people outside the airport Thursday, including 13 members of the US military. An American drone strike destroyed a suspected car bomb Sunday; at least nine civilians died in the explosion. Rockets were fired at the airport today, but no casualties were reported.
The reason there’s no featured post about Afghanistan this week is that I can’t improve on what Ezra Klein said.
As I discussed last week, it’s been maddening to watch so many of the architects of this 20-year disaster go unchallenged on TV while they pretend the only problem is the “competence” of the Biden administration. Apparently, everything would be fine if Biden had just kept the war going for a while longer. And even if he had to end it, there was some clean and clever way to get all the right people out before the roof fell in.
Klein isn’t buying it:
American policymakers and pundits routinely try to rescue the reputation of bad ideas by attributing their failure to poor execution. … Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure.
… I will not pretend that I know how we should have left Afghanistan. But neither do a lot of people dominating the airwaves right now. And the confident pronouncements to the contrary over the past two weeks leave me worried that America has learned little. We are still holding not just to the illusion of our control, but to the illusion of our knowledge.
He points out something I don’t hear anyone else saying: Afghanistan is an example of too much bipartisanship, rather than too much polarization.
At least for my adult life, on foreign policy, our political problem has been that the parties have agreed on too much, and dissenting voices have been shut out. That has allowed too much to go unquestioned, and too many failures to go uncorrected. It is telling that it is Biden who is taking the blame for America’s defeat in Afghanistan. The consequences come for those who admit America’s foreign policy failures and try to change course, not for those who instigate or perpetuate them.
The bipartisan trust in American power and good intentions leads us to imagine that our intervention can only do good, and that any part of the world that captures our attention will benefit. But Klein quotes Ben Rhodes’ observation that Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya are all arguably worse off than when we stepped in.
This is the deep lacuna in America’s foreign policy conversation: The American foreign policy establishment obsesses over the harms caused by our absence or withdrawal. But there’s no similar culpability for the harms we commit or that our presence creates. We are much quicker to blame ourselves for what we don’t do than what we do.
And finally, our fixation on military power causes us to overlook the non-military ways we could help others: We could aggressively vaccinate the people of poorer countries against Covid-19, or fight the perpetual plague of malaria. We could open our doors to refugees fleeing oppression. We could build schools. And we could do it all at a fraction of the cost of fighting a war.
If foreign-policy bipartisanship was to blame for getting us into Afghanistan, it’s gone now. Republicans have taken any cheap shots at Biden they could find, including calling for his resignation after Thursday’s suicide bombing.
Political leaders used to unite behind the president during foreign crises. (Recall the post 9-11 consensus, when President Bush’s approval briefly went over 90%.) Even moreso, former presidents used to avoid direct criticism of their successors. With that in mind, it’s hard to know how to respond to Trump’s current shamelessness. We expect it by now, so it’s not news. And yet, ignoring it doesn’t seem right either.
Now, of course, Trump is imagining that he would have handled all this differently. Not only would everyone have gotten out safely, without leaving any equipment behind, but we wouldn’t have given up the Bagram Air Base at all. “We would have had Bagram open because we always intended to keep it. … We should have kept Bagram because Bagram is between China. It has total access to China, Iran, and Afghanistan.”
Trump’s immaculate withdrawal plan is like his “beautiful” healthcare plan that would have covered everyone and been better and cheaper than Obamacare. It exists only in his fantasies, and in the minds of his gullible followers.
When you heard about Rep. Seth Moulton’s quick trip to Afghanistan, you may have thought, “I wonder if his constituents understand what that was all about.” Answer: No, we don’t. We also didn’t know what he was thinking when he ran for president or tried to oust Speaker Pelosi. My best theory is that some oracle once told him he had a grand destiny, and he’s been acting on that assumption ever since. But he should have gotten a second opinion.
and the pandemic
The summer surge of new cases continues to round off, as if approaching a peak. The two-week increase is now 20%, compared to 36% last week and over 60% the week before. The total number of Americans hospitalized is now over 100K, and still rising at the rate of 24% over two weeks. 30K of those are in either Florida or Texas, whose governors seem to be doing everything they can to help the virus spread.
Deaths are averaging just under 1300 per day, with about 450 in Florida or Texas. The death toll from the beginning of the pandemic is 637K, a number that resembles a major war.
The question now is whether the start of school (and the filling of college football stadiums throughout the land) will give the surge a new boost. Consider this anecdote from California:
An unvaccinated elementary school teacher who took off their mask to read to students ended up infecting more than half of them last May — and they went on to infect other students, family members and community members … In the classroom of 22 students, 12 became infected — including eight out of 10 students in the two front rows.
Examples like this point out the common sense behind masking: If some barrier had just slowed down the virus particles coming out of the teacher’s mouth, maybe at least the kids in the second row would have been safe.
But why mask or vaccinate when you can use a “miracle cure” intended for farm animals? The ivermectin craze has really gotten out of hand. It’s always hard to get reliable estimates of the number of people who try an underground remedy, but it looks like a lot of folks.
A recent study examining trends in ivermectin dispensing from outpatient retail pharmacies in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic showed an increase from an average of 3,600 prescriptions per week at the prepandemic baseline (March 16, 2019–March 13, 2020) to a peak of 39,000 prescriptions in the week ending on January 8, 2021.1 Since early July 2021, outpatient ivermectin dispensing has again begun to rapidly increase, reaching more than 88,000 prescriptions in the week ending August 13, 2021. This represents a 24-fold increase from the pre-pandemic baseline.
And that’s just the people who are getting the human version. (Ivermectin has a legitimate use as an anti-parasitic drug; that’s probably what the pre-pandemic 3,600 prescriptions per week were.) The drug is also sold as a de-wormer for farm animals — and it’s flying off the shelves.
Many feed stores across North Texas told WFAA they are sold out of ivermectin. [farm store operator Matt] Meredith said his supplier told him they can’t get it for him. “Nobody’s got it,” Meredith said. “You can’t even order it online.”
Poison-control centers in Texas say their ivermectin calls have more than quintupled. That’s probably because:
The drugs produced for humans are different than the drug made for livestock, which is “highly concentrated and is toxic to people, and can cause serious harm,” the Mississippi State Department of Health said in an alert Monday.
If it has never occurred to you to dose yourself with some veterinary concoction, you may wonder what this is all about. Simply this: right-wing stupidity. Apparently, the people who think vaccines are unsafe and masks are a Marxist plot also think “Good old pig de-wormer. What harm could that do?”
The thought that ivermectin could have some use against Covid is not crazy in itself. The drug has anti-viral effects in a petri dish, but unfortunately tests on people haven’t panned out.
Funny that this article mentions hydroxychloroquine. The same group that pushed hydroxychloraquine — American’s Frontline Doctors (though their “About Us” page just mentions one doctor: founder Simone Gold; I don’t know who those other white-coated people are) — started pushing this too. Then Fox News chimed in, and Senator Ron Johnson, and the usual collection of know-nothings that your cousin Jerry follows on Facebook. And now people are stealing drugs from their sheep.
If there’s one thing conservatives hate, it’s when liberals imply that they’re stupid. But you know what? Liberals don’t do stupid shit like this. We just don’t. Back in the early days of the pandemic, we acted out our panic by wiping down our groceries before we put them away. It turned out to be a waste of effort, but at least it didn’t hurt anybody or stop us from doing sensible things too. I’ve never heard a Democrat say “I don’t need a vaccine, because I wipe down my groceries.”
So if you’re the kind of clear-thinking Republican who doesn’t like being lumped together with these yahoos, let me point something out: Hillary Clinton warned you. The point of her infamous “deplorables” speech was never that all Trump voters were deplorable. (Fox News turned it into that, but that wasn’t what she said.) That speech was targeted at people like you, and the point was: Look who you’re associating yourself with. In another 2016 campaign speech, she quoted a Mexican proverb: “Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are.”
So look at the horse-paste eaters, you smart, sophisticated Republicans. Those are your people.
Matt Yglesias calls attention to some interesting data from the Federal Reserve: Restaurant sales are now above pre-pandemic levels, but restaurant employment is still below pre-pandemic levels.
The Government contends that the first sentence of §361(a) gives the CDC broad authority to take whatever measures it deems necessary to control the spread of COVID–19, including issuing the moratorium. But the second sentence informs the grant of authority by illustrating the kinds of measures that could be necessary: inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of contaminated animals and articles. These measures directly relate to preventing the interstate spread of disease by identifying, isolating, and destroying the disease itself. The CDC’s moratorium, on the other hand, relates to interstate infection far more indirectly: If evictions occur, some subset of tenants might move from one State to another, and some subset of that group might do so while infected with COVID–19. …
We expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’ ”
I’m not in the habit of agreeing with the Court’s conservative majority, but I think they’ve got a point here. A year and a half into the pandemic, Congress has had plenty of time to either declare a long-term eviction moratorium itself, or to delegate that power to the CDC or some other agency. It hasn’t done so. The problem here isn’t the Supreme Court and it isn’t the Biden administration. As I’ve observed before, the dysfunction of Congress forces the other two branches to over-reach.
When considering an executive branch claim of power, it’s worth asking this hypothetical question: How would I feel about this power in the hands of an administration I didn’t like? If the CDC has broad authority to do whatever it finds necessary to deal with a public-health emergency, could a Trump-appointed CDC head have used that authority to, say, cancel the 2020 elections? I’m not sure, but the possibility creeps me out.
Also, we tend to think of landlords as rich corporations, and probably the owners of most rental properties are. But a lot of landlords are middle-class people who have a large chunk of their net worth invested in properties they rent to one or two households. (I live in an apartment attached to the back of a friend’s house. My wife and I are their only tenants. After moving to town when I was a toddler, my parents rented out the house on their 160-acre farm.) A nationwide eviction moratorium does a lot more than just stick it to the fat cats.
This week’s second important case concerned the Trump administration’s remain-in-Mexico plan for people seeking asylum at our Southern border. I’ve thought it was always questionable whether that policy really meets our treaty obligations to give refugees a hearing, but that wasn’t the issue here. The Biden administration has tried to end the program, but the State of Texas sued to keep it in place. Technically, the policy has been on hold anyway since March, 2020, due to Trump administration Covid restrictions at the border.
A district court granted Texas an injunction, keeping the policy in place while the legal process plays out. The administration asked for a stay of that injunction, and the Court denied it. The denial is just a paragraph, so there’s not a lot to go on here. Vox tries to flesh out what it all means, but comes to the conclusion that the decision makes no sense.
but I want to tell you about a book
The featured post reviews Charles Blow’s recent The Devil You Know: a Black power manifesto.
and you also might be interested in …
The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection is taking an aggressive approach. Wednesday it asked for documents from eight federal agencies. The word “sweeping” appeared in many articles about the requests, which centered on “archived communications from the Trump White House“. The Committee is also seeking records from Facebook and Google “on policy changes social media companies made, or failed to make, to address the spread of misinformation, violent extremism and foreign influence, including decisions to ban content.”
We don’t know yet whether anyone is going to fight these orders, and if so on what grounds.
The effort to sanction lawyers who filed baseless lawsuits in support of Trump’s Big Lie continues. Wednesday, a federal judge in Michigan ruled against seven Trump lawyers, including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood.
[US District Judge Linda] Parker is ordering the lawyers to reimburse the attorneys’ fees that the city of Detroit and Michigan state officials paid in seeking the sanctions. The lawyers must also take legal education classes, the judge said, and she is referring her decision to the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission, and “the appropriate disciplinary authority for the jurisdiction(s) where each attorney is admitted,” for potential disciplinary action.
Rudy Giuliani has already had his license suspended in DC and New York.
The gist of the judge’s opinion is that the lawyers made claims their affidavits didn’t support, failed to vet their affidavits for credibility, and made false claims about the laws they were invoking. Judge Parker wasn’t buying the lawyers claims of ignorance about the complaint they signed their names to or the flimsiness of the evidence they provided.
Plaintiffs’ counsel may not bury their heads in the sand and thereafter make affirmative proclamations about what occurred above ground.
… Although the First Amendment may allow Plaintiffs’ counsel to say what they desire on social media, in press conferences, or on television, federal courts are reserved for hearing genuine legal disputes which are well-grounded in fact and law.
Babbitt, the only person killed by police during the January 6 riot, has become the Horst Wessel of the violent Trumpists. Her shooting was captured on video, so there is no doubt what happened. She was part of a violent mob trying to break down a door to get into the House chamber, where many congresspeople were still present. Officer Michael Byrd was behind the door with gun drawn and clearly visible through the glass, when the window was broken and Babbitt began to climb through.
Byrd argues that the shooting saved lives, which seems obvious to me.
The Boston Globe’s list of the 25 best TV episodes of the 21st century is a conversation starter. Your list may differ, but the main thing I gleaned from their list was an appreciation of just how much amazing TV there has been these last 21 years. I can’t think of any TV series from my youth that could compete with “The Wire”, “Mad Men”, “The Americans”, “Game of Thrones”, or “The Sopranos”.
One federally funded Covid program makes the “seamless summer” school lunch option available year-round. Rather than paying for free lunches for low-income students, the government offers free lunches to everyone. The program has a variety of goals, mostly relating to the unpredictability of food insecurity during the pandemic, but one effect is to remove the stigma of free lunches. You don’t have to announce that you’re poor in order to get one.
408 school districts in Wisconsin are eligible for the program, and one is opting out. Waukesha wants to go back to a system where 36% of kids get free lunches and the rest don’t.
Karin Rajnicek, a school board member, said the free program made it easy for families to “become spoiled.” Darren Clark, assistant superintendent for business services, said there could be a “slow addiction” to the service.
As a taxpayer, I suppose I ought to be horrified that some hedge-fund manager’s kid might be eating free fish sticks or sloppy joes on my dime. Strangely, I’m not.
and let’s close with something timely
The Holderness Family’s music parodies have been a great help in staying sane during the pandemic. As a body of work, their songs express the mood swings of an ordinary family muddling through a historically difficult time. This video makes Katy Perry’s “Firework” the platform for a rant against the paperwork parents have to fill out if they want to get their kids back into school.
And if you’ve forgotten what school at home was like, there’s a video for that too, based on Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week”.
Charles Blow wants Black people to reverse the Great Migration and form majorities in the Southern states.
One day in 2013, New York Times columnist Charles Blow was at a conference on civil rights, when he heard 86-year-old Harry Belafonte ask “Where are the radical thinkers?”
On the walk back to the Times’ Midtown offices, … it occurred to me that maybe I had been thinking too small, all my life, about my approach to being in the world and conceiving my role in it. I had to remember that a big idea could change the course of history.
The result was The Devil You Know: a Black power manifesto, which came out in January but had somehow escaped my notice until recently. Blow’s big idea is indeed big: Black Americans in the North, particularly young adults looking for a place to establish themselves, should move to the South, for the purpose of forming a Black majority in several Southern states.
This would be bigger than just electing a Black mayor or governor somewhere. The entire political power structure would know it was answerable to a Black majority. For the first time in American history, Blacks could focus on ending White supremacy through their own power rather than on compromising their goals to get White cooperation.
Those same majorities could elect two senators per state, and those senators would all know that they could not stay in office without maintaining their Black support.
I am not advocating for a Black nationalism, but a Black regionalism — not to be apart from America, but stronger within it.
Blow is very frank about the reason to take this radical approach: If the issue is achieving true equality, everything else has been tried and hasn’t worked. Abolition didn’t do it. Moving north during the Great Migration may have opened some economic opportunities and allowed an end-run around Jim Crow, but the North had its own forms of racism. The civil rights movement achieved an on-paper legal equality, but all the major gaps remain in wealth, income, education, home ownership, incarceration, and even life expectancy.
He describes at length the generations of effort to form majority coalitions with sympathetic Whites: from Booker T. Washington’s attempts to promote Black virtue and education in order to convince Whites that his people deserved their favor, to W.E.B. Du Bois’ vision of a “talented tenth” that would blaze a trail into the professions and into positions of power, all the way up to Barack Obama’s audacity of hope. Blow wants to be done with waiting and hoping; he wants Black people to have the power to shape their own destiny.
Black colonization of the South isn’t a philosophy or an intellectual posture. It’s an actual plan.
Blow grew up in a majority-Black town in Louisiana and went to college at Grambling, an HBCU. Throughout his formative years, being Black felt normal to him. He was not an outsider or an interloper or someone who had to prove he deserved to be wherever he was. He then went north to achieve success in White-dominated institutions like The New York Times before returning south to live in Atlanta. He sees the South as a cultural homeland, not just for himself, but for American Blacks in general. The South, horrific as its racism has been at times, is the devil they know.
I really wanted to take my talents and the resources I could bring and bring them to an institution that was actually built for Black uplift and Black excellence, that wasn’t built in opposition to the work that I want to do and me as a human being.
Like Hannah-Jones, Blow seems to be done with proving himself to Whites, and wants a plan for Black equality that doesn’t rely on convincing Whites to overcome their racism.
For me, that was one of the most fascinating aspects of reading this book. Blow is writing to convince other Black people, so I am not his target audience. I suspect that’s why the book is as short and readable as it is: He can appeal to Black common sense — about the police, about the centrality of racism in America history and culture, about the role of the South in African-American consciousness, etc. — without marshaling arguments to help Whites catch up. So I can be a fly on the wall as Blacks talk to each other.
This in itself is a lesson in White privilege: It’s strange and even shocking that an NYT columnist would write a book not targeted at us. But those outside of privileged classes must have that experience every day.
This week I contributed to the negative-Covid-test statistics. It turns out I had a cold, which is one reason why there’s no featured post this week. The other reason is that Ezra Klein’s article “Let’s Not Pretend that the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem” already said what I wanted to say about that issue. I’ll quote from that in the weekly summary, and add a few late-breaking-news details as tomorrow’s deadline on the Afghan airlift approaches.
In addition to the usual pandemic stats, the summary also contains a perversely satisfying rant about the ivermectin craze. (I suppose I could have broken that out into its own post, but I’m not all that proud of how snide it gets.) Then there’s the hurricane, and a couple of important Supreme Court decisions, one of which I even agree with.
Like last week, there’s a book section. I discuss Charles Blow’s surprisingly radical book The Devil You Know, where he floats the idea of reversing the Great Migration to create Black majorities in several Southern states. Since he’s trying to convince other Black people — the point is to get them moving in, not White people moving out — reading his book as a White man gives me a fly-on-the-wall feeling. The rarity of that experience is a reminder of my privilege: Most people who write books write them for me.
And I’ll close with a Holderness Family music parody about back-to-school paperwork.
I’ll predict that the weekly summary will post around 11 EDT.
Refugees are legal immigrants, and yet all the anti-immigration people get just as freaked out about refugees as they do about illegal immigration. It was never about the legality.
and the pandemic
Just like last week, things are getting worse at a slower rate. Last week, the 14-day increase in new Covid cases in the US was running over 60%. Now it’s 36%. The only two states where case numbers are shrinking are the states where the current wave started: Missouri (-12%) and Arkansas (-2%).
Mississippi has both a high new-case rate and a high rate of increase (and, not coincidentally, the nation’s lowest vaccination rate). Things are bad there already, and they’re going to get apocalyptic.
Much attention is being given to the high rates of Covid among children, which are surpassing the January peak. I haven’t seen much analysis of what their ineligibility for the vaccine has to do with this. Maybe the whole country would already have passed the January peaks — in deaths as well as cases — if not for the vaccines.
The FDA gave full approval to the Pfizer vaccine today. (Like the other vaccines, it’s been available via an emergency use authorization.) We’ll see if this makes any difference to the people who have been avoiding the vaccines because they’re “experimental”.
Post-Sturgis, South Dakota once again has the nation’s highest rate of increase in new Covid cases (312%). Thanks, Governor Noem.
In general, it was a bad week for the pro-Covid governors. Tennessee’s Bill Lee got denounced by a member of his Covid task force. Florida’s Ron DeSantis is facing revolt from several school districts over his ban on mask mandates, and a lawsuit challenging his order goes to trial today.
It’s hard to know how seriously to take over-the-top anti-vax activists like this one, who threatened Springfield, Missouri pharmacists with execution under the “Nuremberg Code”, which bans involuntary medical experiments. Maybe this is all a publicity stunt, in which case we’re giving him what he wants by paying attention. On the other hand, maybe he and his small band of followers really are whipping themselves up to kill people.
Geoffrey Cain’s The Perfect Police State is the story of the oppression of the Uyghur minority that lives in Xinjiang province in China’s far northwestern corner.
Bouncing back and forth between discussions of Chinese high-tech companies and interviews with Uyghurs who have escaped to Turkey, Cain argues that technology has at long last caught up to our imaginary dystopias. It’s now reasonably cheap to post cameras everywhere and network them together. The bottleneck in the dystopian process used to be paying enough people to watch all those feeds, but now artificial intelligence has learned to recognize faces and voices. It can also track smartphones and sift through everyone’s social media feeds.
What this means for the Uyghurs is a unified “social credit” score, an algorithmic assessment of how “trustworthy” the government thinks you are. If your score falls below a certain level, you can’t travel. If it falls further, you can’t buy or sell. Below that, you must report to a reeducation camp, where you are constantly on camera, and your face’s every expression is evaluated (by a tireless algorithm, of course) for signs of “ideological viruses” like terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism.
Naturally, one sure way to lower your score is to hang around with other untrustworthy people. So once your score starts to drop, others will shun you to protect themselves.
Like 1984, where Winston Smith eventually learns to love Big Brother, the goal isn’t simply that you reject these “poisons of the mind”. Ultimately, you are expected to express gratitude to the Chinese government for curing you.
You may or may not care about the Uyghurs. (I certainly didn’t before reading this book.) They’re ethnically Turkic Muslims on the other side of the world, after all, and there are only about 12 million of them in Xinjiang, less than 1% of China’s total population. You probably don’t know any of them.
But here’s why you should pay attention: Authoritarian governments perfect their tactics on sub-populations that no one wants to defend. But once the bugs are worked out, those tactics never stay in their boxes. Surveillance and facial-recognition software are already spreading. Data-hungry algorithms are already studying every footprint you leave on the internet. “Social credit” is an idea with many potentially beneficial applications.
Case in point: Apple is rolling out an algorithm to detect child-sexual-abuse photos and videos, even if they’re encrypted, by doing some higher-level evaluation of the databases they come from. But developers who abandoned work on a similar system point out a key problem: The tech is not subject-matter specific. If Apple can help US law enforcement detect encrypted child-abuse materials, it can help Chinese law enforcement detect encrypted pro-democracy materials.
Apple is making a bet that it can limit its system to certain content in certain countries, despite immense government pressures. We hope it succeeds in both protecting children and affirming incentives for broader adoption of encryption. But make no mistake that Apple is gambling with security, privacy and free speech worldwide.
Who wants to defend people who abuse children? Nobody. And makes them the perfect guinea pigs.
CNN explains the looming disaster of the Colorado River and what it means for the Southwest. Climate change is cutting the quantity of water the river carries, while a combination of irrigated agriculture and growing cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas need more and more.
The water shortage then creates an energy shortage: There is less water for hydroelectric dams, and one proposed water solution — desalinization plants near the mouth of the river in Mexico — would be very energy-intensive.
The NYT Magazine reports on “superweeds“: unwanted but highly evolved competitors to cash crops. They’re evolving resistance faster than the chemical companies can develop new weed-killers, threatening the whole factory-farm model.
The article flashes me back to being maybe 12 years old, and fighting an outbreak of buttonweeds by walking up and down the rows of Dad’s soybean field pulling them up. Today, after decades of get-big-or-get-out, no farming family has enough kids to do that.
While I’m listing things that are worth investing time in, I have two podcasts to recommend. NYT’s “The Argument” series has an actually intelligent, respectful discussion among people who disagree about critical race theory.
Also Ezra Klein’s more-than-an-hour interview with Lilliana Mason (from which I get the quote at the top). Klein wrote the book Why We’re Polarized, and Mason wrote Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. They discuss “How Identity Politics Took Over the Republican Party”. It’s a wide-ranging discussion that I can’t boil down to one quote, but I found this part particularly fascinating: There’s a project called the Voter Study Group that interviewed thousands of people in 2011, and then has gone back to interview the same people again at regular intervals.
these data became sort of a time machine for us, where we could go back to 2011, before Trump was a major political figure, and try to see what types of people are drawn to Trump in the future. Before Trump existed, what were their characteristics that then predicted they would really like him in 2018?
So one of the things that we found, obviously being a Republican, being a conservative, that predicted that they would like Trump in 2018. And it also predicted that they would like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and the Republican Party in general. However, for Trump himself, and Trump alone, the other thing that predicted whether they would like him was that they disliked Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics and L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Any mix of those, but largely all of them. And that animosity towards those marginalized groups did not predict support for the Republican Party. It did not predict support for Mitch McConnell or for Paul Ryan. It just predicted support for Trump.
And also, these people were coming not just from the Republican Party. Democrats who had these attitudes in 2011 liked Trump in 2018. Independents who had these attitudes in 2011 liked Trump in 2018. So it’s almost like Trump acted as a lightning rod for people who held these attitudes. He was extremely attractive to them, regardless of party, regardless of ideology.
and you also might be interested in …
Thursday morning, news networks were fixated on a guy parked near the Library of Congress. He claimed to have a bomb in his truck and was demanding that Biden resign, in addition to spouting a lot of Trumpist disinformation. When he surrendered after five hours, the truck was discovered to contain bomb-making materials, but no bomb.
By Friday morning, the incident was well down the Washington Post’s home page, and not mentioned on the NYT’s home page at all. Nothing to see here, just a guy making noise to draw attention to his fascist views. (He also tried to get noticed by throwing money on the sidewalk.) But I doubt it’s the last incident we’ll see of Trump-inspired terrorism in DC.
TPM focused a the woman who posted a picture of the bomber in his truck.
“It’s a white guy in a truck near the Capitol,” she said. “I’m not from D.C., I don’t know if that’s a regular Tuesday here.”
She said she saw some people ignore the man and keep walking, while one DoorDash delivery man stopped his bike to scoop up the bills.
One of her classmates, Bobb said, stopped a Supreme Court police officer to alert him to the situation, but he said it was the jurisdiction of the Capitol Police.
“Weird, okay,” Bobb remembers thinking. “So if there was a guy with a gun, you’re just gonna wait for the right people to come?”
Rep. Mo Brooks (F-AL) had an interesting response to this incident: He sympathized with the terrorist’s motives, while distancing himself from terrorism per se, at least for now.
I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial Socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom, and the very fabric of American society. The way to stop Socialism’s march is for patriotic Americans to fight back in the 2022 and 2024 elections. I strongly encourage patriotic Americans to do exactly that more so than ever before. Bluntly stated, America’s future is at risk.
The underlying message, which I think Brooks’ fellow fascists will hear loud and clear, is that it’s not time for political leaders like Brooks to endorse violence YET. If Democrats win again in 2022 and 2024, though, all bets are off. The goal — overthrow of the Biden regime by whatever means prove necessary — is not questioned. When “the very fabric of American society” is at stake, “patriots” might have to destroy democracy in order to save it.
The Proud Boy leader who burned a DC church’s Black Lives Matter banner in December (in a violent demonstration that now looks like a rehearsal for the January 6 insurrection) argues that it wasn’t a hate crime: He wasn’t terrorizing a Black church, he was protesting BLM because it’s “Marxist”.
This is a primary tactic for racists who want to deny their racism: Pin a pejorative label on somebody because they’re Black, and then claim you’re reacting to that label, not to their race. It’s like the people who claimed to oppose Obama because he was born in Kenya. Of course, Hawaii early on said Obama was born in Hawaii, and that should have been the end of that controversy. Birthers continued to believe Obama was born in Kenya only because they hated having a Black president.
Similarly, BLM is “Marxist” because it’s pro-Black.
One reason I’m not as panicked about the 2022 midterm elections as many other Democrats are: Republicans do have a number of advantages, but they are also going to have trouble unifying their conservative and fascist wings. The NYT discovered some warning signs at a Gaez/Greene “America First” rally in Iowa:
Ms. Greene denounced Covid-19 vaccines to applause. Both declared former President Donald J. Trump the rightful winner of the 2020 election.
These were facts, argued Eric Riedinger of Des Moines, 62, a small-business owner who attended the event and owns the website BigTrumpFan.com. And he would not vote for any Republican who failed to state this clearly, he said.
“My biggest issue looking ahead: Stop the RINOs,” he said, using a pejorative conservative phrase for ‘Republicans in Name Only.’ “If they’re part of that infrastructure bill and supporting it, they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.” …
“I’m not voting for anyone who won’t say Donald Trump had the election stolen from him,” said Ron James, a 68-year-old retiree from Des Moines. “And I don’t think anyone in that room would, either.”
At the moment, the only way to prove you’re not a RINO is to take positions that are not just false, but also deeply unpopular with the electorate as a whole.
Marcy Wheeler boils down a WSJ scoop to: “John Durham won’t charge any of Trump’s favorite villains.” The investigate-the-investigators probe has lasted longer than the Mueller investigation, and produced far less. A report is expected soon.
Durham will not charge anyone for spying on Trump before the opening of the investigation, because it didn’t happen. Durham will not charge the FBI or CIA for setting Joseph Mifsud up to entrap George Papadopoulos, because it didn’t happen.
Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family have come to symbolize the corporate profiteering side of the opioid crisis. A court is deciding whether to finalize a Purdue bankruptcy deal that raises billions for settlements, but also lets the Sacklers walk away with billions and no further responsibility. Apparently we have to choose between compensation for the victims and justice for the villains.
Have you ever thought the highway signs in your area could be better? Back in 2001, LA street artist Richard Ankrom decided to improve a freeway sign. He made and installed a new sign, and did it so well that the fake wasn’t discovered until he gave interviews about it — after the statute of limitations had expired. CalTrans left the sign up, and eventually replaced it with a duplicate.
This video was made on the 10th anniversary of the prank, and now it’s the 20th anniversary.
The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on [the Trump administration’s] agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.
There would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1.
There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict.
I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.
That speech led to what TPM’s Josh Marshall called “peak screech” from the DC media. In Tuesday’s morning newsletter from Politico, Marshall elaborates, “A sort of primal scream of ‘WTF, JOE BIDEN?!?!?!!?!’ virtually bleeds through the copy.”
Immediately after Biden’s speech, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace offered this blunt assessment of a mainstream that her show itself was often swimming in:
Ninety-five percent of the American people will agree with everything [Biden] just said. Ninety-five percent of the press covering this White House will disagree.
Her numbers were exaggerated, but the overall point was dead-on: I can’t remember the last time the media was so unified and so intent on talking me out of my opinion.
This was not a question of facts that they knew and I didn’t. The mainstream media has been equally unified in combating misinformation about the Covid vaccines, say, or in batting aside Trump’s self-serving bullshit about election fraud. But in each of those cases, there is a fact of the matter: The vaccines work. Fraud did not decide the election.
But Afghanistan is different. The belief that our troops should have stayed in Afghanistan a little bit longer (or a lot longer or forever) is an opinion about what might happen in the unknowable future. It’s also a value judgment about the significance of Afghanistan to American security compared to the ongoing cost in lives and money. Reasonable people can disagree about such things.
But apparently not on TV. The Popular Information blog talked to “a veteran communications professional who has been trying to place prominent voices supportive of the withdrawal on television and in print”.
I’ve been in political media for over two decades, and I have never experienced something like this before. Not only can I not get people booked on shows, but I can’t even get TV bookers who frequently book my guests to give me a call back…
I’ve fed sources to reporters, who end up not quoting the sources, but do quote multiple voices who are critical of the president and/or put the withdrawal in a negative light.
I turn on TV and watch CNN and, frankly, a lot of MSNBC shows, and they’re presenting it as if there’s not a voice out there willing to defend the president and his decision to withdraw. But I offered those very shows those voices, and the shows purposely decided to shut them out.
In so many ways this feels like Iraq and 2003 all over again. The media has coalesced around a narrative, and any threat to that narrative needs to be shut out.
As we have watched the rapid dissolution of the Afghan government, the takeover of the country by the Taliban and the desperate effort of so many Afghans to flee, the U.S. media have asked themselves a question: What do the people who were wrong about Afghanistan all along have to say about all this?
That’s not literally what TV bookers and journalists have said, of course. But if you’ve been watching the debate, it almost seems that way.
A parade of retired generals, military contractors, and think-tank talking heads were given a platform to explain how Biden had made a “terrible mistake“, that was “worse than Saigon“, and that pushed his presidency past “the point of no return“. Afghanistan has ruined the Biden administration’s image of competence and empathy, and it will “never be the same“.
As we saw with the beginning of these wars in 2001-2003, these moments of unanimity allow a lot of dubious ideas to sneak in to the conversation. Let’s examine a few of them.
Yes, this was a “forever war”. One false idea I keep hearing is that Afghanistan had settled down to the point where a minimal US commitment could have held it steady: maybe 2-3 thousand troops that would rarely take any casualties. Jeff Jacoby was one of many pushing this point:
Yes, the United States has been involved in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, but the last time American forces suffered any combat casualties was Feb. 8, 2020, when Sgt. Javier Gutierrez and Sgt. Antonio Rodriguez were ambushed and killed. Their sacrifice was heroic and selfless. But it makes little sense to speak of a “forever war” in which there are no fatalities for a year and a half. Nor does it make sense to apply that label to a mission involving just 2,500 troops, which was the tiny size to which the US footprint in Afghanistan had shrunk by the time Biden took office.
And The Washington Post made space for Rory Stewart to claim:
When he became president, Biden took over a relatively low-cost, low-risk presence in Afghanistan that was nevertheless capable of protecting the achievements of the previous 20 years.
But you know what else happened in February of 2020? Trump’s peace agreement with the Taliban. Once Trump agreed to totally withdraw, the Taliban stopped targeting US troops. The “low-cost, low-risk” presence depended on the Taliban believing our promise to leave. If Biden had suddenly said, “Never mind, we’re keeping 2,500 troops in place from now on.”, we’d soon start seeing body bags again, and realizing that 2,500 troops weren’t enough. Biden was right: “There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1.”
Popular Information points out the hidden cost to the Afghans of our “light footprint”:
With few troops on the ground, the military increasingly relied on air power to keep the Taliban at bay. This kept U.S. fatalities low but resulted in a massive increase in civilian casualties. A Brown University study found that between 2016 and 2019 the “number of civilians killed by international airstrikes increased about 330 percent.” In October 2020 “212 civilians were killed.”
Jacoby invokes the example of Germany, where we have kept far more than 2,500 troops for far longer than 20 years. “Should we call that a forever war, too?” No, because Germany has no war. If Nazi partisans were still hiding in the Bavarian mountains, which we regularly pounded with air power, and if we worried about them overthrowing the Bundesrepublik as soon as our troops left, that would be a forever war in Germany. Is that really so hard to grasp?
Actually, no one saw this coming. Much has been made of the few intelligence reports that warned of the Afghan government falling soon after we left. But if that had actually happened, we’d have been OK — or at least better off than we are.
What did happen, though, is that the Afghan army dissolved and the leaders fled Kabul before we were done leaving. That’s why we’re having the problems we’re having. And literally no one — certainly not the “experts” who are denouncing Biden on TV — predicted that.
Evacuating our people sooner wouldn’t have avoided the problem. Imagine you’ve spent the evening in the city, and as you go through the subway turnstile you see the last train home vanishing down the tunnel. Naturally, you think “I should have left the party sooner.”
Commentators are thinking like that now, but the metaphor doesn’t work. In the metaphor, you and the train are independent processes. If you’d arrived at the station five minutes earlier, the train would have been waiting and you’d have gotten home.
The fall of Saigon in 1975 was exactly like a train leaving: It took time for the North Vietnamese/Viet Cong forces to fight their way to Saigon. If you didn’t get out before they arrived, you should have started leaving sooner.
But the Taliban didn’t fight their way to Kabul; the Afghan army we had so lavishly equipped simply dissolved in front of them, in accordance with surrender deals previously worked out. And the signal that started the surrender was the Americans beginning to leave. Nobody wanted to be the last person to wave the white flag, so when they saw Americans evacuating, it was time.
In other words: Afghanistan is more like the train operator being in contact with someone at the party, so that he could start pushing off as soon as you were on your way.
So yes, Biden could have started pulling out a month or two sooner. And the collapse would have happened a month or two sooner. Again, Biden nailed it: There was never a good time to leave Afghanistan.
Imagine if Biden had foreseen everything and been transparent about it. So in June or July he goes on TV and says, “The Afghan Army isn’t going to fight, so the government going to fall very suddenly. If you want to be part of the evacuation, start off for the airport now.”
Not only would the collapse have begun immediately, but all the Liz Cheney and David Petraeus types would claim that Biden had stabbed the Afghans in the back. Biden’s lack of faith, they would claim, and not the Afghan government’s failings, would have been to blame.
And now picture what happens to the politics of welcoming the Afghan refugees. Tucker Carlson and the other nativist voices are already claiming the Afghan rescue is part of the massive Democratic plot to replace White Americans with immigrants. “First we invade, then we’re invaded.” Laura Ingraham echoed that concern:
All day, we’ve heard phrases like “We promised them.” Well, who did? Did you?
How much more weight would this immigration conspiracy theory have, if the first visible sign of collapse had been Biden expressing his lack of faith in the Afghan government? Clearly, replacement theorists would argue, Biden wanted Afghanistan to collapse so that he could bring in more immigrants — possibly “millions” of them, as Carlson has already warned.
The war, and not the end of the war, is what lowered America’s standing in the world. I can’t put this better than David Rothkopf already did when he listed “the top 30 things that have really harmed our standing”. His list is more Trump-centered than mine would be — I’d give a prominent place to the Bush administration’s torture policy — but we agree on this: Having things go badly for a few weeks while we’re trying to do the right thing is not on it.
Spending 20 years, thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars fighting a war that, in the end, accomplished little — that lowers our standing in the world. Ending that war doesn’t.
So what explains the “peak screech”? I’m sure someone in the comments will argue that the DC press corps is part of the corrupt military-industrial complex that has been profiting from the continuing war, but I’m not going there. (In general, I am leery of the assumption that the people who disagree with me are corrupt. That assumption gives up too easily on democracy, which requires good-faith exchanges of ideas between disagreeing parties. I’m not saying there is no corruption and bad-faith arguing, but I have to be driven to that conclusion. I’m not going there first.)
Josh Marshall offers a two-fold explanation, which rings true for me. First, the major foreign policy reporters have personal connections to a lot of the people who are at risk in Afghanistan, or to people just like them in other shaky countries. If you reported from Afghanistan, you had a driver, you had an interpreter. Maybe your cameraman was Afghan. You depended on those people, spent a lot of downtime with them, and maybe even met their families. Maybe their street smarts got you out of a few difficult situations. Will they now be killed because they helped you? You never committed to bring them to America, which was always beyond your power anyway. But you can’t be objective about their situation.
Second is a phenomenon sometimes described as “source capture”. A big part of being a reporter is cultivating well-placed sources. For war reporters, that means sources in the Pentagon or the State Department, or commanders in the field, or officials in the Afghan government or military. Even if you have no specific deal with these sources, you always understand the situation: If you make them look bad, they’ll stop talking to you.
Over time, as you go back to your sources again and again, you start to internalize that understanding, particularly with the ones who consistently give you reliable information. You identify with them. You stop thinking of them as your sources and start to think of yourself as their voice. If they are invested in a project like the Afghanistan war, you start to feel invested in it too.
Marshall sums up:
[W]hat I’m describing isn’t a flag-waving, America’s never wrong, “pro-war” mindset. It’s more varied and critical, capable of seeing the collateral damage of these engagements, the toll on American service members post combat, the corruption endemic in occupation-backed governments. And yet it is still very bought-in. You see this in a different way in some of the country’s most accomplished longform magazine writers, many of whom have spent ample time in these warzones. Again, not at all militarists or gungho armchair warriors but people capable of capturing the subtleties and discontents of these missions and the individuals caught up in their storms. And yet they are still very bought-in. And it is from these voices that we are hearing many of the most anguished accusations of betrayal and abandonment. It is harrowing to process years or decades of denial in hours or days.
What we see in so many reactions, claims of disgrace and betrayal are no more than people who have been deeply bought into these endeavors suddenly forced to confront how much of it was simply an illusion.
If the last two weeks have revealed anything, it’s exactly how much of an illusion our “nation-building” in Afghanistan always was. Real countries, with real governments and real armies, don’t evaporate overnight.
People who have been living in denial typically react with anger when their bubble pops. They ought to be angry at the people who duped them, or at themselves for being gullible. But that’s not usually where the anger goes, at least not at first. The first target is the person who popped the bubble.
So damn that Joe Biden. If he’d just kept a few thousand troops deployed and kept the money spigot open, we could all still be happy.
This week’s public discussion was dominated by the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. What struck me about that discussion, though, was how one-sided it was. Even ordinarily liberal MSNBC shows, or newspaper outlets like the Times and the Post, were unified in their denunciation of the Biden administration and its plan to withdraw our troops.
I haven’t seen that level of unanimity since the post-911 era, when the Iraq and Afghanistan wars started. A lot of bad ideas sneaked into the discussion around that time, and didn’t get criticized because there was no room for criticism. I think the same thing is happening now. That’s the subject of “Afghanistan, Biden, and the Media”, which should post around 10 EDT.
The weekly summary will also cover the ongoing Covid surge, which seems to be slowing down, but hasn’t turned around yet. I also want to call your attention to some longer reads that are well worth your time: Geoffrey Cain’s new book The Perfect Police State about China’s high-tech oppression of the Uyghurs, CNN’s article on the Colorado River, and the NYT’s report on “superweeds”, plus a couple of long interviews that are worth streaming.
I can’t decide how much attention to give the truck-bomber-without-a-bomb who terrorized central DC Thursday. The incident itself is of little consequence, but it points to the ongoing threat of Trumpist terrorism. The Sackler family is hoping to escape their role in the opioid crisis with their wealth largely intact. And I’ll close by marking the 20th anniversary of a legendary act of guerrilla public service: the guy who improved an LA freeway sign so well that nobody noticed until he announced it.
The puzzle for me is the absence of contingency planning: If everyone knew we were headed for the exits, why did we not have a plan over the past two years for making this work?
It’s no great surprise that the Taliban is taking over now that American troops are pulling out. But the speed of the Afghan government’s collapse has stunned many commentators and even US government officials. The human tragedy for any Afghan who shares Western values, especially women who are educated or employed or just want to be able to leave the house, will probably be immense.
There are two ways to read this:
Biden should have prevented this by leaving some number of troops in Afghanistan indefinitely.
The speed of the collapse underlines just how little our 20-year war accomplished, and makes the case against investing more American blood and treasure.
I hold the second position. I see the appeal of the first position, because I appreciate how much suffering this outcome will unleash. (“It’s like my identity is about to be scrubbed out,” one woman said.) But I think people who hold that view need to say the word “indefinitely” out loud and fully wrap their minds around it. In 20 years, we did not build a government that the Afghan people want to defend, and $83 billion in weapons and training did not establish a fighting force that could stand up to the Taliban for more than a few days.
More years and more billions probably wouldn’t change that. Quite the opposite, in fact: Governments propped up by a foreign power typically get better and better at sucking up to the foreign power, and worse and worse at representing their people.
If we’d been facing reality these last 20 years, we wouldn’t be in this position today. Instead, we’ve heard a constant series of justifications for staying another year, and then six months after that, and so on. Within months of the invasion in 2001, we had troops in Kabul and knew that Bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora. That was the moment for a realistic conversation about what we could hope to accomplish in Afghanistan and how much the American people were willing to sacrifice to do it. Instead, the Bush and Obama administrations conspired to sell us fantasies. Trump kept saying we should get out, but then kept letting the generals talk him out of it. The Biden administration has finally faced up to reality, ugly as it is.
The one thing Biden can be faulted for is summed up by the quote at the top. Why wasn’t there a better plan for getting Americans, as well as the Afghans who had helped us, out of the country in an orderly way?
One thing we can say clearly is that an open-ended commitment to keep fighting in Afghanistan is deeply unpopular across a broad spectrum of the American public. Trump ran against “endless wars” in 2016, and kept threatening to pull troops out of Afghanistan precipitously, but then being stalled by his generals. (Now, of course, Trump insists his withdrawal would have been better.)
The Economist (subscription required) describes Afghans preparing for Taliban rule: hiding books they expect to be banned, buying burqas, etc. The reporter talks to one woman in Kandahar became a doctor under the American-backed government. Now she stays home, or wears her mother’s poorly fitting burqa when she goes out.
India’s Deccan Herald describes the problem of “ghost soldiers”: non-existent personnel falsified so that corrupt officials could collect American money to pay and supply them. Last summer, a report to Congress from the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said:
[G]etting an accurate count of Afghan military and police personnel has always been difficult. For example, in 2013, before becoming president, Ashraf Ghani told Inspector General Sopko in a meeting at his residence that the United States government was still paying the salaries of soldiers, police, teachers, doctors, and other civil servants who did not exist.
One of the enduring impediments to overseeing U.S. funding for the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) has been the questionable accuracy of data on the actual (“assigned,” as distinct from authorized) strength of the force.
Seeing how fast the ANDSF units collapsed, you have to wonder how many of them really existed in the first place. And if they existed, were they being paid, or was the money vanishing before it got to the soldiers?
When an Afghan police officer was asked about his force’s apparent lack of motivation, he explained that they hadn’t been getting their salaries. Several Afghan police officers on the front lines in Kandahar before the city fell said they hadn’t been paid in six to nine months.
I was wrong. For months, I have been skeptical that Republican Senate votes were available for anything Biden wanted to do, no matter how obviously good for the country it might be. So the negotiations over the bipartisan infrastructure bill looked like a stalling exercise, similar to the way Republicans strung President Obama along on the ACA. Republicans and Democrats might spend all summer constructing a “framework” for an infrastructure compromise, but when push came to shove, I figured, the details would never work out, and the ten Republican votes needed to overcome a filibuster would evaporate.
The Senate went on to pass (50-49 on party lines) a budget resolution that makes space for the $3.5 trillion infrastructure package Democrats plan to pass through the filibuster-proof reconciliation process. That will be taken up in September, after the Senate returns from its recess.
At that point the cat-herding begins: Since no Republican support is expected, all 50 Senate Democrats and all but a handful of the House Democrats have to come to agreement. Speaker Pelosi wants the House to consider both bills simultaneously, so it’s likely neither will pass the House until the Senate passes (or fails to pass) the reconciliation package.
The path of disaster is that the reconciliation package fails, and House progressives follow through on their threat to sink the bipartisan bill, with the result that nothing passes. I think Democrats of all stripes recognize how bad that would be, so I expect the Senate to pass something via reconciliation: maybe not $3.5 trillion, maybe without everything currently envisioned.
So what’s in the two bills? I haven’t looked at the 2,700 pages of text myself, so I have to trust other sources.
Investopedia has a good summary (though I don’t understand why it says the bipartisan bill is $1.2 trillion, when most other sources I found said $1 trillion).
The bipartisan bill is almost all “traditional” infrastructure: roads, bridges, the power grid, water systems, ports and airports, environmental clean-up, public transit, etc. But Democrats did get a certain amount of forward-looking funding included: rural broadband, cybersecurity, electric school buses and charging stations. The $550 billion of new spending is spread over five years.
The reconciliation package isn’t written yet. Various Senate committees have been assigned amounts of money and objectives, with the recommendation that they each have their part of the bill written by September 15. The $3.5 trillion is supposed to be spent over eight years.
In a nutshell, the reconciliation package covers two things Republicans couldn’t stomach: serious amounts of money to combat and mitigate climate change, and “human infrastructure” like housing, education, and elder care.
To me, the climate change projects are worth the disaster-scenario risk, but I could compromise on the rest. I think it’s important to keep repeating David Roberts’ point: There is no non-radical position on climate change now. The choice is whether to take radical action or accept radical impacts.
One thing to keep in mind: It takes time to build infrastructure, so hardly any projects will be complete and improving Americans’ lives in time for the 2022 elections. At best, Democrats’ 2022 message will be more like “Help is coming” rather than “Look what we built.”
Conversely, since the actual roads and bridges will still be in the future, Republicans will be able to manufacture fantasies of elaborate boondoggles, similar to the way they imagined “death panels” into the ACA during the 2010 election cycle.
The Working Group I (of three groups) contribution to Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out this week. I’ve been having a hard time getting a handle on it.
Observed increases in well-mixed greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations since around 1750 are unequivocally caused by human activities. … It is virtually certain that the global upper ocean (0–700 m) has warmed since the 1970s and extremely likely that human influence is the main driver. It is virtually certain that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main driver of current global acidification of the surface open ocean.
Of course, the summary is the opinion of hundreds of the top climate scientists in the world, as selected by governments with a wide variety of political views and economic interests. The details backing those assessments are in the 4000-page report, as well as in the thousands of studies and peer-reviewed research papers it cites. But if you don’t have the time or expertise to evaluate all that — and I don’t — then why shouldn’t we believe the one or two guys Fox managed to dig up?
The question I’d like answered is: What do we understand now that we didn’t understand in 2013, when the fifth assessment came out?
The main answer to my question seems to be that the uncertainty is shrinking: There’s already been 1.1 degrees centigrade of global average warming since 1750 (when coal-burning really got going). Due to greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, that will become 1.5 degrees in the next two decades. And the wide range of unusual weather events — droughts, heat waves, floods, storms, etc. — that we’ve been wondering whether to blame on climate change? Yeah, they’re climate change. And they’re going to happen more frequently and more extremely as the planet continues to warm.
Another Grist article calls attention to “tipping points”, which are thresholds that change the system in ways that stoke further change, making the previous status quo unrecoverable. One such tipping point involves the arctic permafrost: If CO2 emissions raise global temperature enough to start melting the permafrost, the additional CO2 that had been frozen there will be released.
But that’s not the whole story. If you look at a category the Census Bureau calls “white alone or in combination”, that’s still 71% of the country. Its percentage fell much less, from 73% in 2010, and its raw numbers are actually up. So it’s not that Whites are being “replaced”, the way Tucker Carlson likes to tell the story. There’s more interracial marriage and mixed-race children than there used to be, so fewer people are identifying as purely White.
Politically, the important issue is whether light-skinned Hispanics and other Americans who don’t fit traditional definitions of whiteness will see themselves (and be seen by others) as participating in the racial majority. That’s a social question, not a demographic question.
and the pandemic
I remember a button-and-t-shirt meme from the 70s: “Cheer up! Things are getting worse at a slower rate.” That’s the story here. The new-cases-per-day numbers keep rising — 130K now — but if you look at the trend over the past several Mondays — 50K, 80K, 110K — you can see the graph starting to level off. (Southern Missouri, where this wave started, is having fewer cases now.) OTOH, school is opening and it’s too soon to see the results of this year’s Sturgis super-spreader rally (which was even bigger than last year), so the contagion might take off again.
Compared to two weeks ago: cases are up 64%, hospitalizations 65% (to 76K), and deaths 113% (662). Deaths are a lagging indicator, so the fact that deaths are increasing faster than cases is, perversely, a good sign.
This wave continues to be concentrated in the comparatively unvaccinated South. Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi are all averaging over 100 new cases per day per 100K people, compared to 13 in New Hampshire and 14 in Maryland and Michigan. Michigan is the oddball here: Its 49% vaccination rate is slightly less than Florida’s 50%, though well above Mississippi’s 36%.
Florida’s Ron DeSantis is making a case to be the most pro-Covid governor in the country. (As the cartoon demonstrates, though, there is competition.) In spite of having some of the worst county-wide outbreaks (Columbia County has 212 new cases per day per 100K), he has banned mask mandates in schools and vaccine mandates in businesses and government offices. He describes Covid in schools as a “minor risk”. He told President Biden to leave Florida alone at a time when the state was requesting ventilators (which it got) from the feds.
Being the retirement capital of the US, Florida is blessed with abundant hospital beds. So its nation-leading 72 Covid hospitalizations per 100K aren’t collapsing the system as badly as Mississippi’s 52 are. Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee (where my nephew’s wife is a nurse) is full. Go have your emergency somewhere else.
and you also might be interested in …
Andrew Cuomo faced reality and resigned. Matt Gaetz, on the other hand, will probably hold out until there’s an indictment.
Trump was not reinstated as president on August 13. Mike Lindell’s three-day symposium, which was supposed to reveal irrefutable proof that China stole the election from Trump by hacking Dominion voting machines all over the country, came and went without convincing anybody, much less leading to a 9-0 Trump reinstatement vote at the Supreme Court. The main question the symposium raised for sane observers was: Is Lindell a grifter, or is he the victim of grifters who sold him “proof” of something he desperately wanted to believe?
This is yet another opportunity for Trump cultists to return to reality, but I doubt many of them will. For the few who do, I believe the best we can hope for is not an “OMG, I’ve been lied to” moment, but rather a shift of attention somewhere else, with eventual amnesia about the whole delusional episode.
Incredibly, after eight years of constant criticism in the White House, Obama still doesn’t know his place. Look at what he did Saturday: He had a party to celebrate his 60th birthday! I mean, who does that?
A 12-year-old Canadian girl was forced out of co-ed hockey because … I’m not sure exactly. Something to do with dressing rooms.
and let’s close with something big
Remember the movie “Air Bud” about the dog who played basketball? Well, they should make one about an elephant. Though I’m not sure what the rules say about throwing your teammate at the basket.
Lots of news this week, but I don’t believe I have any special insight into most of it, so there won’t be a featured post. Instead, I’ll collect other people’s takes in the weekly summary and make short comments.
The big event is the fall of Afghanistan. Nobody is surprised that the Afghan government couldn’t hold the country against the Taliban without our help, but the speed of the collapse has been stunning. Kabul fell yesterday. A broad consensus of Americans wanted this war to end, and understood that the Afghanis would suffer after we left. But it’s hard to watch all the same.
Against my predictions, Republicans in the Senate voted for a bipartisan infrastructure bill. Charlie Brown really did kick the football this time! I’ll outline what’s in this bill, what’s expected to be in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, and what’s likely to happen next.
The IPCC put out a new climate report, which is hard to evaluate if you’re not an expert, so I’ll link to some experts. The 2020 census found surprisingly few white people in the US, or at least it looks that way. Despite predictions, Trump was not reinstated on Friday. Barack Obama had the audacity and nouveau-riche bad taste to celebrate his 60th birthday. (I mean, who does that? And why didn’t Beyoncé come to my 60th birthday party?) Haiti had an earthquake. And the closing video proves that elephants can play basketball. They don’t dribble well, but they’re unstoppable on the alley-oop.
I’ll predict that the weekly summary comes out a little after 10 EDT.
Given the data from 2020-21 showing very low COVID-19 transmission rates in a classroom setting and data demonstrating lower transmission rates among children than adults, school systems are not required to conduct COVID-19 contact tracing.
These numbers have sparked concerns that what had once seemed like the smallest of silver linings — that Covid-19 mostly spared children — might be changing. Some doctors on the front lines say they are seeing more critically ill children than they have at any previous point of the pandemic and that the highly contagious Delta variant is likely to blame.
The publicly known facts suffice to open an investigation, now. They include Trump’s demand that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” 11,780 votes to declare he won that state’s election; Trump’s pressure on acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen as well as Vice President Mike Pence to advance the “big lie” that the election was stolen; the recently revealed phone call in which Trump directed Rosen to “just say the election was corrupt, [and] leave the rest to me,” and public statements by Trump and associates such as Rudolph W. Giuliani and Rep. Mo Brooks on Jan. 6 to incite the mob that stormed the Capitol.
None of these facts alone proves a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, but together they clearly merit opening a criminal investigation, which would allow prosecutors to obtain phone and text records, emails, memos and witness testimony to determine whether Trump should be charged.
The article specifies the criminal charges that such an investigation might lead to, depending on what facts are uncovered: conspiracy, obstructing an official proceeding, racketeering, voter fraud, coercing officials to violate the Hatch Act, inciting insurrection, and seditious conspiracy.
Briefly: There are two controlling Supreme Court decisions. In Nixon v Fitzgerald, the Court ruled that a president can’t be sued for damages resulting from his official acts. Basically, presidents should be able to carry out their duties without worrying about judges second-guessing them. In Clinton v Jones, the Court laid out the opposite boundary: Presidential immunity doesn’t extend to actions that are totally outside a president’s official duties.
Zolle argues (correctly, IMO) that inciting a mob to disrupt Congress is not part of a president’s official duties.
Tuesday, the New York Attorney General released a report concluding that Governor Cuomo had sexually harassed multiple women. The accusations are of unwanted touching and suggestive comments. The report describes the governor’s office as a toxic work environment that normalized Cuomo’s inappropriate behavior.
Many people had already called for Cuomo’s resignation as soon as it became clear that there would be more than just one or two accusations, while others wanted the investigation to play out first. Now that the report is official, calls for Cuomo’s resignation or impeachment are nearly universal, including national Democratic figures like President Biden, Majority Leader (and New York Senator) Chuck Schumer, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as large numbers of Democrats in the New York legislature.
Cuomo continues to insist that he did nothing wrong, but other than the governor himself, Cuomo defenders are hard to find.
The accusations against Cuomo are actually less serious and smaller in number than those against former President Trump, but Democrats refuse to circle the wagons around Cuomo the way Republicans have around Trump. This is one of the major differences between the two parties.
The average daily numbers of new Covid cases in the US continues to rise sharply, and is now up to 110K, up from under 80K last week and 50K the week before. Average daily deaths are now over 500. Just under 62K Americans are hospitalized with Covid, not quite double the number two weeks ago.
Louisiana (99 new cases per day per 100K residents) and Florida (90) are the current hot spots, but numbers are rising everywhere. In my home county of Middlesex in Massachusetts, our 11 new cases per day per 100K is up from less than 1 a month ago. Vermont, the most vaccinated state in the country (68% of all residents), has 10 new cases per day per 100K.
The differences between states in deaths is much starker. Maine has .01 Covid deaths per day per 100K residents, while Arkansas has .68.
Schools are set to open soon, and debate about how to open them is heated. Almost everyone, from the Biden administration on down, wants in-person classes available to any student who wants them. The CDC says
Students benefit from in-person learning, and safely returning to in-person instruction in the fall 2021 is a priority.
The question is what safeguards are needed to open schools safely. The CDC is recommending children get vaccinated if they are over 12, and wear masks in class. But in Florida, Governor DeSantis is threatening to take state funding away from school districts that mandate masks. Many red states have such mandate bans, and a number of hard-hit school districts are planning to defy them.
In Arizona, a state law forbidding mask mandates in schools goes into effect in late September, though it was written to apply retroactively. Even so, several school systems, including districts in Phoenix and Tucson, have decided to require masks on campus when the school year begins.
At the center of this debate is the changing nature of the virus as the Delta variant spreads. Nationally, the number of cases is about 1/3 of its January peak, but the number of children hospitalized with Covid is nearly the same.
That number has been climbing since early July; from July 31 to Aug. 6, 216 children with Covid were being hospitalized every day, on average, nearly matching the 217 daily admissions during the pandemic’s peak in early January.
Hospitals in coronavirus hot spots have been particularly hard hit. On a single day last week, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, in Little Rock, had 19 hospitalized children with Covid; Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, in St. Petersburg, Fla., had 15; and Children’s Mercy Kansas City, in Missouri, had 12. All had multiple children in the intensive care unit.
Texas school districts will not be required to conduct contact tracing this year if a student contracts COVID-19, according to new guidelines issued by the Texas Education Agency this week.
The agency said a district should notify parents if it learns of a student who has been a close contact to someone with the virus. But with the relaxation of contact tracing, broad notifications will not be mandatory.
So if there’s a Covid outbreak in your child’s school, you might not hear about it.
In addition, Democrats are trying to craft a voting-rights bill far less ambitious than the For the People Act which failed in the Senate.
It’s hard to raise excitement about processes that move so slowly, but this is the success or failure of the Biden administration right here. Democrats need to go to the voters in 2022 with proof that government can accomplish things. If government can’t improve people’s lives, then why not vote for the Republicans, who are far more entertaining?
The nightmare scenario is that divisions among Democrats will result in nothing getting passed. Moderate Democrats are skeptical of the price tag of the reconciliation bill, while progressives regard the bipartisan bill by itself as a sell-out. If neither passes, Democrats will certainly lose the House in 2022, and then nothing worthwhile will get through Congress for the rest of Biden’s term.
and you also might be interested in …
I was going to write a much longer note, or maybe even a separate post, about Tucker Carlson broadcasting his show from Budapest this week and doing a propaganda interview with its authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán. But I decided I was just letting him troll me, so instead I will say a few simple things and provide links.
When authors write about how democracies die, Hungary is usually a prime example. In 2018, Vox published a long-but-worth-it article explaining how Hungary’s “soft fascism” works: All the trappings of democracy and free society are allowed to exist, but the rules are rigged to prevent any opposition from getting traction. You can have your individual anti-government opinions, but you are blocked at every turn from raising money or getting media attention or organizing any kind of effective resistance.
Carlson’s Budapest trip is an example of American conservatives becoming increasingly open about their anti-democratic agenda. If they have to ditch democracy to win the culture wars, they think that sounds like a good deal.
So they love Orbán’s anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-cosmopolitan policies, and it sets them dreaming about getting an autocrat of their own. Here’s Rod Dreher of American Conservative being interviewed in Hungarian Conservative, an English-language journal that gets substantial funding from the Hungarian government:
I have often said that if Donald Trump had had even half the intelligence and the focus of Viktor Orbán, America would be a very different place. Maybe in 2024, for the conservative movement, we will be able to put forward a politician, a presidential candidate, who is more like Orbán than Trump.
Matt Yglesias responds to conservative envy of Hungary by pointing out that much of America’s economic vibrancy comes from immigration, and that parts of the US (rural West Virginia, say) are already “non-diverse, non-cosmopolitan, highly traditionalist”. They’re also comparatively poor. Strangely, people don’t want to move there.
a lot of contemporary conservatives just look at small, poor, backward, insular Hungary and think to themselves “this is great, this is better than living in Austin and having food from all over the world and a vibrant music scene and a world-class university and all these tech companies.” You get this paranoia that the arrival of foreign-born people is an existential threat to the native stock, so anything would be better than letting that continue.
And I really do think we should all stop and ponder how un-American and wrong that is. The nice lady from Mexico who sold me some breakfast tacos in downtown Kerrville this morning did not replace anyone, nor did the second-generation Vietnamese guy who was born in Houston and moved here to open a Chinese restaurant. Donald Harris taught at Stanford and his daughter became vice president. That’s a great American story. And the people who think it would be better to live in a country where that kind of thing never happens — a country like Hungary — are nuts.
The July jobs report says the US economy added just under a million jobs, and unemployment dropped to 5.4%. But we’re still 5.7 million jobs short of the pre-pandemic highs.
On both sides, a lot of the current debate about Biden’s economic performance is just noise. As the pandemic receded, jobs were going to come back and inflation was going to take off, at least temporarily. Claiming the jobs as a Biden achievement or inflation as a Biden failure is just silly.
As has been true for more than a year, the economy is the tail and the pandemic is the dog. If we deal with the pandemic, the economy will recover; if we don’t, it won’t. So Biden deserves credit for his management of the vaccine distribution, and the corresponding effect on the pandemic. If Trump had been reelected and had somehow gotten the same vaccine numbers, he also would have seen an increase in jobs and inflation.
The question is what happens from here. The Delta-variant surge didn’t really get going until mid-July, so these numbers don’t tell us how much it will slow down the economic recovery.
I don’t know if it’s the research I do on right-wing extremism or an algorithm not grasping the sarcasm in my comments, but Facebook is convinced I want to see ads for Christian nationalist t-shirts worn by muscular White guys with tattoos. I’m guessing that they do the photo shoots in a prison yard.
and let’s close with something unlikely
I try not to repeat closings, and I’ve used Two Cellos before, but that was a different song seven years ago. So here’s “Welcome to the Jungle” on cellos.
The Weekly Sift 