Strange days and soothing fantasies

David Kurtz writes a newsletter which introduces the daily minutia of the news for the journalistic site Talking Points Memo. Very occasionally he steps back from the chatter and noise, folly and scandal to think about the strange times we are living. A recent such piece seems worth sharing in full:

As we come to the end of a difficult week, it’s becoming obvious that daily news coverage isn’t sufficient to capture what a deeply strange period we’re living through.

The former president is on criminal trial for making hush-money payments to a porn star he says he didn’t have sex with, while trying to stave off the three other criminal prosecutions he faces. At the same time, he is promising more post-election criminality if he loses in 2024, which is the very thing two of the remaining prosecutions are seeking to convict him for having done in 2020.

Not content to merely replay his first term, he is promising a second presidency that will be authoritarian to its core. It begins with the premise that he must exact retribution against all who have wronged him, including prosecuting the current president whom he falsely claims is behind his own legal turmoil. From there, he swears he will target disfavored classes of people – immigrants, the press, anyone whose fealty to him he perceives to be insufficient – abusing the powers of his office to inflict pain and suffering to the delight of his supporters.

He is also determined to harness the full powers of the federal government in pursuit of personal political and private ends, even and perhaps especially if that means breaking government in the process.

In the meantime, the coverage of the current president is the same tired analysis, worn thin by overuse, and utterly oblivious to the looming authoritarian threat. Complexities like post-pandemic economic policy are reduced to a thin gruel of “inflation is bad for incumbents.” The nightmarishly difficult Israel-Palestine conflict is more easily covered as an American political story about law and order, and so campus protests are forced to stand in as a poor proxy for the actual conflict in the Middle East.

In the face of what almost certainly is a significant historical moment that is full of uncertainty and unpredictability, we grasp for ways to make sense of it all but what we grab ahold of for comfort and security is oversimplification, reductiveness, and cliches. Rather than rising to the moment, we just try to cover our eyes and soothe our souls so we can endure it. It’s a temptation that’s hard to resist.

It’s in moments like these that the overconfident diagnoses and simplistic solutions of someone like Donald Trump hold their greatest allure. He offers certainty amidst the chaos, even if he has no idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t have the skill or capability to do anything about it. He’s a chaos monster: the more of it he creates, the greater the need for the snake oil palliatives he offers. He’ll make you sick to sell you his bogus curatives.

This is all happening against the backdrop of the even bigger existential threat than Donald Trump: climate change. The environmental catastrophe already underway adds layers of uncertainty that we may have never encountered before as a species. It dwarfs our political chaos. It feeds the anxiousness that makes us seek solid ground, some permanence, a place above whatever the new high water mark may turn out to be. For many people, it’s easier to find immediate security in a Trump (even if that means drowning later) than enduring the uncertainty, trying to make sense of it all, and doing the hard work of piecing together solutions.

So don’t get too caught up in the day-to-day news. There lies madness. Embrace the uncertainty, live with the dis-ease that comes with not knowing, and forswear the cheap and easy fixes offered by tawdry figures who prey on the victims of the chaos they create.

No easy fixes, but keep on keeping on ...

Gaza war: a complete military failure and an ominous political success

What follows is an article, in full, about the murderous Gaza campaign by way of Standing Together, a Jewish and Palestinian movement of citizens of Israel organizing in pursuit of peace, equality, and social and climate justice.

The author, Dr. Guy Laron, is a lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Bringing about the collapse of Hamas isn’t one of the goals of the war in Gaza  

If we judge the military operation in Gaza by the goals that the government presented to the public, it is obviously a complete failure. After six months of combat, the IDF hasn’t reached its primary goal: destroying Hamas’s control in Gaza. The assessments are that thus far the IDF has disabled a third of Hamas’s combat force and destroyed about twenty percent of the organization’s tunnels. This is a hard hit but not a fatal blow and Hamas is alive and kicking. Not only that, but Hamas has managed to take control of areas that the IDF withdrew from and shoot rockets from those areas to the towns in the Gaza Envelope. 

Moreover, the other declared goal of the operation - bringing back the hostages - hasn’t been achieved either. The absolute majority of hostages that were released thus far were freed as a result of a deal in which they were swapped for Palestinian prisoners.
 In contrast, only three hostages were released as a result of a military operation. Even worse, three hostages were shot dead by the IDF and an unknown number of hostages were killed as a result of the IDF’s indiscriminate bombings (according to what Hamas ordered the Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg to say in a recently released video, Hamas estimates that 70 hostages died this way). 

The cabinet that decided to go to war included two retired Chiefs of General Staff,
one retired Major General and a Prime Minister, who has approved and supervised many military operations. Moreover, the current Chief of Staff pushed and pressured the cabinet to approve the military ground operation in Gaza. These people knew full well the limits of what could or could not be achieved by the military plans they were approving. Proof of this can be found in the interview that Gadi Eisenkot gave to Ilana Dayan. The experienced General explained well to the senior journalist why the operation has no chance to free hostages: the hostages aren’t held above ground in an isolated object like a plane or a bus, he said, but are hidden in tunnels that the IDF will struggle to reach. Therefore, it’s easy to conclude that the goals of the operation as they were presented to the public were meant to recruit public support for it, but were never the real goals that the cabinet aimed for. 

What then are the real goals of the operation? 

The first real goal of the operation - and it is valuable to the current coalition - is protecting the settlements in the West Bank. The settlers’ movement’s leadership has gained representation in key offices in the current administration: The ministries of Finance, Security, and National Security which is in charge of the police. The judicial reform that the coalition was promoting was also meant to enable a unilateral annexation of the West Bank without providing civil rights to the Palestinians living there. If implemented, this reform would have enshrined the property rights of the settlers. 

In the decade and a half preceding Hamas’s attack, Netanyahu did all he could to convince the Israeli public that the occupation comes at a low cost. Israel, Netanyahu claimed, could become a high-tech powerhouse and forge ties with countries in the region despite the expansion of the settlement project in the West Bank. The key to that, the Prime Minister explained, is to keep the divide between the West Bank and Gaza, as a result of the two areas being controlled by opposing and competing Palestinian organizations. Netanyahu also seems to have thought that Hamas had an interest in becoming a collaborator to the Jewish colonialism in the West Bank as a result of the money they received from Qatar. 

Hamas’s attack on October 7th destroyed all of these assumptions. Hamas used the money from Qatar to build a sophisticated war machine, making a laughing stock of Netanyahu in Israel and around the world. Had Israel limited its response to the attack, focused on rebuilding the security fence and on a hostage deal, the public would have had time to discuss the collapse of “the Bibi doctrine” and demand snap elections. By deciding to start a military operation, the government bought itself time and postponed a public debate over the true costs in money, blood, and reputation, of the settlements in the West Bank. 

By rejecting another hostage deal, the government is taking off the table the question of the “day after”, and any agreement or peace accord which would ensure a long-
term calm along the borders. This is because the government is afraid that any formal agreement with the Palestinians will require an evacuation of some of the settlements. 

In addition, the government isn’t only acting to protect the settlements, but also working on expanding this project through activity that is meant to destabilize the West Bank. For example, the government is refusing to allow Palestinian workers from the West Bank to return to work within Israel and it’s trying to hurt the Palestinian Authority (PA) by refusing to transfer money that the PA deserves according to the Paris Agreements.  

In this way, financial suffocation is created in the West Bank and the ability of the PA to pay officials and police officers is curtailed. The activity of settler militias who damage Palestinian property and expel Palestinian farmers has also continued after October 7th.  

While the fighting continues, the government is acting to promote the second real
 goal of the war, which is the continuation of the government's judicial reform. This continuation is meant not only to reduce Israel’s democratic space but to completely privatize all government services. The government is working towards total privatization relying on sectorial politics to garner support. These are, in fact, complementary steps. Reducing the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly are tools to suffocate the protests over the collapse of the welfare state. Those who are working most ardently to promote these goals are the ministers of the Religious Zionist party.  

For example, the Minister of National Security continues the task of appointing the police’s senior ranks, turning it into a political party’s militia. Furthermore, Itamar Ben Gvir is privatizing national security by doling out tens of thousands of weapon permits. Thus, the police is losing its status as the keeper of order and security, to a host of local militias. Personal security turns into the mission of individual citizens rather than the state. 

At the same time, the Minister of Finance continues to distribute money to sectors that are close to the government, the Ultra-Orthodox and the settlers. All of this is happening while the health, education and public transportation services are collapsing due to painful cuts that the Minister of Finance is forcing upon them. In this way, following the collapse of the education and health systems that belong to all of the public, the only route for citizens to get education and health services is by joining the settler or Orthodox sectors.  

The third real goal of the operation is a live ammo demonstration of the army’s capabilities, combined with its attempt to recover its reputation. The guilt of the military establishment goes beyond the devastating defeat of October 7th. No organization internalized “the Bibi doctrine” to a greater extent than the army. The army wasn’t only securing the settlements, but creating bureaucratic and technological arrangements that turned the occupation and the settlements into a low-cost operation.
The army identified the unease of the educated bourgeoisie from the mission of policing in the West Bank, so it assigned the mission to the working class that served in specialized police battalions. The sons and daughters of the educated bourgeoisie were integrated into high-tech army units that were meant to allow the management of the conflict even with a small number of personnel. They got to serve in units that promised them profitable employment in the future, and along the way solved the army’s manpower shortage problem.  

Thanks to this, the IDF could move most of its infantry to security missions in the West Bank and leave only a small number of forces along the northern and southern borders. The army convinced itself that the intelligence capabilities of the 8200 unit, as well as the robotic technologies that were deployed along the southern border, would ensure that the army wouldn't be caught unawares, and if it was, it could respond immediately. 

The IDF believed in the “Bibi doctrine” to such an extent that the high-ranking officers in the Intelligence Corps refused to understand the obvious signs of an impending attack. Even when the lower ranks in the intelligence forces - like the field observers or non- commissioned officers in the 8200 unit - brought convincing proof of a coming attack, the colonels at the military intelligence branch shut their ears. Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7th exposed the incompetence of Israel's military leadership. 

To deal with the fear and the shock of the Israeli public, the army is holding onto the military operation as an immediate solution to the hit its image took on October 7th. Since 2006, the General Staff of the IDF, which is usually led by officers from the ground forces, invested in technological capabilities that would allow the army to improve over its poor performances in the 2006 Lebanon war. The current "Iron Swords" war has given these generals an opportunity to check if the investment succeeded and test it on the battlefield. 

When those generals understood that the ground operation wouldn't lead to the defeat of Hamas, the fourth real goal of the operation was born: the mission of revenge. Though they knew that it would create a difficult problem for Israel with the international judicial system, the generals in the General Staff and battalion commanders in the field allowed the soldiers on the frontlines to upload videos and photos that would satisfy the public’s lust for revenge and make them forget the fact that the operation won’t be able to destroy the Hamas. 

That is how the ground operation in Gaza became a military failure and a political success. Under the guise of the operation, the army and the government are rehabilitating their public image and promoting their institutional interests. Their political egoism is expressed in their willingness to ignore the difficult problems that they create: the regional and global isolation of Israel, an eternal conflict in the Gaza Strip, an economic crisis, and political polarization in Israel. These ministers and generals lead to an endless war. After them, the deluge!

Editing: Tom Alfia


Translation to English: Tal Vinogradov 

A timely reminder

And then, this:

For Mother's Day

Martha Sidway Adams, 1923

In this picture, my mother would have been 15. She looks ready to take on the world, doesn't she?

Three women journalists respond to Stormy Daniels's testimony

I didn't expect to be very interested in the porn entrepreneur's couple of days under oath in Donald Trump's trial for falsifying records of illicit payments which Trump thought, in October 2016, would protect his candidacy. There was an election to be won ...

But Donald also has insisted that he never fucked Stormy, even though he signed checks to Micheal Cohen which the prosecution asserts covered payments to Stormy for her silence.

Trump put the story of their encounter at a Tahoe golf tournament on the court's agenda by denying it ever happened.

Her testimony seems, in the opinion of many reporters, to have dispelled any possibility that this is anything but another Trump lie.

I'm finding the way women reporters handle the story fascinating.

Anita Chabria is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps distance and location afford her the opportunity for a delightfully breezy take on Stormy on the stand.

Stormy Daniels has been in the spotlight — literally — since she started stripping in Louisiana at age 17 to pay the bills when her negligent mother kept disappearing. She was called as a prosecution witness Tuesday in the Donald Trump hush money trial, putting her on the global stage.

Folks, this is a woman who isn’t scared of a fight, and isn’t afraid to talk about sex — even if we are.

In a world where women are routinely expected to be ashamed about any public conversation of sex, whether it’s consensual or during an assault, Daniels didn’t avoid the nitty-gritty.

That included accounts of spanking Trump with a magazine, silky jammies (his) and her own ambivalence in the moment, all told in a rapid-fire, conversational tone while she looked right at the jury.

Daniels’ radical shamelessness is important because it upends the status quo that men have long depended on in sex-involved court cases — that the woman will be humbled, and that she can be torn down as weak or a liar because of the humiliation, guilt and stigma we expect her to feel.

... With decades of experience as a sex worker, Daniels doesn’t seem cowed by expectation or the squeamishness displayed by [Judge] Merchan and others in the courtroom.

“You could compare it to a doctor talking about surgery and arteries and blood and tissue,” [Alana] Evans [a sister porn entrepreneur] said. “These are things they see every day and it doesn’t affect them. You show that to someone else and they may pass out.”

... to see Stormy Daniels rejecting the contempt piled on other women in her situation is wonderful — though she too said she felt the infamy of it all.

When asked who she had told about the sex, she said very few people.

“Because I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it, that I didn’t say no. A lot of people would just assume — they would make jokes out of it. I didn’t think it was funny,” she said in court.

But why should she be disgraced with the dumb blond trope when it was Trump who had a wife at home, with their newborn son?

Why should she be apologetic for being a sex worker when she has built a business — acting, directing, producing, writing — that has made enough money for her to support herself and her family?

Why should she accept being vilified, just because that makes people more comfortable?

The truth remains, not many women can sustain this bold posture. The New York Time's in-court observer Jessica Bennett catches the ambivalence many women feel in sexual encounters with oblivious men who seem to assume that sex ratifies their power over women.

... “The room spun in slow motion”; “I was staring up at the ceiling”; “I was ashamed” — will remind a lot of women not of family men, but of stories about unwanted but perhaps not entirely nonconsensual encounters that many of us harbor. ...

This had me running to figure out how many of the jurors were women. (Five of twelve it turns out.) I suspect that it would be hard to find sexually active women to be on the jury who had not had the experience of lying there, feeling no emotional connection to the guy, and wondering when this would be over. And the men in this drama, judges and lawyers, may not even know enough to look for those women.

I'm an old lady lesbian and this may be nowadays a less common experience, but perhaps not.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte at Salon thinks journalists, especially male journalists, have learned something from #MeToo that is coloring their coverage.

... What the press coverage of Stormy Daniels' testimony shows is that journalists have a far more developed understanding of how to place an experience like what she recalled into context. It may not have been a sexual assault by the legal definition — and Daniels has repeatedly denied that is what it was — but alongside other stories, it fleshes out a picture of Trump as a man with coercive tendencies. (Something he brags about publicly when talking about matters outside of sexuality.) This matters in helping the public understand the complexities when it comes to issues like sexual violence and consent. But it also matters in understanding this specific criminal case.

Trump's team demanded a mistrial after Daniels testified, arguing that the vivid telling of the ugly encounter was prejudicial. Judge Juan Merchan denied the request, as well he should have. As unpleasant as it was for everyone to hear about how Trump pressured Daniels into unwanted sex, it was necessary to establish the prosecution's case. As MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin explained on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Wednesday, the prosecution wants "the jury to understand is what the impact of her story would have been, had Michael Cohen, in the final days of the campaign, not rushed to reach settlement with her."

There's much more to come in this legal joust.

Yet another legal atrocity

Employers can still discriminate against LGBTQ employees. At least some employers can.

We might think this sort of thing was just an historical curiosity -- but not so.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday [May 8] sided with a Catholic high school that fired a gay teacher over his plans to marry his partner, saying that the termination did not violate federal workplace protections for LGBTQ workers.

A three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said the North Carolina school did not violate Lonnie Billard’s rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal anti-workplace discrimination law that protects against race, sex and religious discrimination.

Two members of the panel held that Billard “played a vital role as a messenger” of Charlotte Catholic High School’s faith values and said as a result, his firing was permissible under the “ministerial exception to Title VII.”

That is, a drama teacher at a school run by a religious institution has to follow and promote its line, whatever that line is. Religion trumps the full citizenship of a guy who just wanted to share the news of who he loved.

A couple of thoughts: 

1) Those artsy types are always the subversives. 

2) All of us need to be aware that our "rights" exist at the sufferance of federal judges.

After the Supreme Court decision voiding women's right to abortion, we should all know the second point.

Such moderate gas prices!

 

Yes -- gas on Martha's Vineyard is nearly a dollar cheaper than in San Francisco. People who live on the island think of what they pay for gas as obviously extortionate. And the price is far higher than in mainland Massachusetts. But my sticker shock goes the other way.

 

According to Calmatters the Golden State is genuinely special when it comes to gas prices:

Californians pay more at the pump than residents of any other state — an average of $5.34 a gallon for regular unleaded, compared to the national average of $3.64, according to AAA. Statewide, gas prices have jumped 55 cents a gallon from this time a year ago.

Governor Newsom suspects the oil industry of sticking it to Californians in pursuit of windfall profits.

Most of the rest of the country reports what seem truly lower prices than on either coast:

Click to enlarge.

Bring on those electric vehicles -- but in the meantime, the pricing patterns are daunting.

Migration: people keep coming. Some facts.

Republicans screaming about an "invasion" at the southern U.S. border encourage me to tune out accounts of what is actually happening. To my way of the thinking, folks have always wanted to come here when life became brutally unbearable in their previous homes. We live pretty well here, sometimes a lot better than pretty well. So sure, folks will try to come. That's how most current citizens' ancestors got here, Black folks with enslaved forbears and Native people excepted.

But we probably should be aware the current migrant flow is different. A lot more people from different countries are turning up trying to get in.

 ... An NBC News analysis of newly released data from the Department of Homeland Security shows a fundamental shift. Before the pandemic, roughly 9 in 10 migrants crossing the border illegally (that is, between ports of entry) came from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — the four countries closest to the border. Those countries no longer hold the majority: As of 2023, for the first time since the U.S. has collected such data, half of all migrants who cross the border now come from elsewhere globally.

The greatest numbers have come from countries farther away in the Americas that have never before sent migrants to the border at this scale. In the 2019 fiscal year, for example, the number of Colombians apprehended illegally crossing the border was 400. In fiscal 2023, it exploded to 154,080 — a nearly four-hundred-fold increase.

But they come, too, from countries in Africa, Eastern Europe and every region in Asia. There have been dramatic increases in the number of migrants from the world’s most populous countries: Between fiscal 2019 and 2023, the number of migrants from China and India grew more than elevenfold and fivefold, respectively. And some countries that previously sent negligible numbers of migrants to the U.S. border have seen staggering increases. In fiscal 2019, the total number of people from the northwest African nation of Mauritania apprehended at the border was 20. Four years later, that number was 15,260. For migrants from Turkey, the number went from 60 to 15,430. The list goes on: More than 50 nationalities saw apprehensions multiplied by a hundred or more.

Most of these people are counted because they turn themselves in and claim asylum as they are entitled to do under U.S. law. Because Republicans refuse to adequately fund the immigration system, it takes years for their asylum claims to be adjudicated. Most will not win asylum, but they work in the interim.

The linked article explores the narco-capitalist smuggling industry that profits from people from all over the world trying to come. I don't know enough to know how true that reporting is, but there's probably some truth.

Republican screaming peddles a bunch of lies about migrants.  Here are some.

Click to enlarge.

Meanwhile, the large number of immigrants legally allowed to work in the United States since the pandemic has helped us recover much faster from the doldrums of 2020 than other parts of the world, especially Europe.

... About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Immigrant workers also recovered much faster than native-born workers from the pandemic’s disruptions, and many saw some of the largest wage gains in industries eager to hire. Economists and labor experts say the surge in employment was ultimately key to solving unprecedented gaps in the economy that threatened the country’s ability to recover from prolonged shutdowns.

Donald Trump and his merry band of MAGA nativists want strangle the source of our current economic health.

No king here

 

Perhaps because I'm currently located near this residue of our anti-monarchist past, I find myself enraged by Donald Trump's claim of a king's immunity for his crimes. We got rid of that ... they threw the tea into the harbor and smuggled in untaxed supplies. And later dumped the King.

I'm not alone in my rage. See this letter to Washington Post: 

Why are we even having a discussion about whether former president Donald Trump’s sweeping claims of immunity are justified? Didn’t we fight the Revolutionary War in part because we didn’t want to be governed by an all-powerful king? Somehow, we’ve traveled far from our original vision and ended up with a former president who wants to be seen as a supreme monarch and as a law unto himself with unlimited powers. Incredibly, the Supreme Court (including its staunchly originalist members) is giving this vision a sober hearing. It is disturbing that the court would take such claims seriously, even if it does reject them in the end. ... Vic Bermudez, Springfield

More soberly, New York Times columnist and conservative legal eagle David French spells it all out. (Link is unlocked.) 

... it’s difficult to understand the structure of the Constitution without understanding it as a small-r republican rebuke to royal authority. The American colonists had seen the danger of concentrated royal power — including royal immunities — and set about demolishing that power, comprehensively and thoroughly.

It’s doubtful that Louis XIV actually uttered the famous quote attributed to him, “L’état, c’est moi” — which roughly translates to “I am the state” — but it does accurately describe what European royal authority was like at its height. The king was the nation’s most powerful warrior, lawmaker, judge and priest. His word was law, and there was no law above his word.

In fact, the modern concept of sovereign immunity, which protects federal and state governments from suit, is rooted in the common law British concept “that the king could do no wrong.” The National Association of Attorneys General roots this doctrine in “the king’s position at the ‘apex of the feudal pyramid.’”

But our president isn’t at the apex of any pyramid. He may possess immense power as the nation’s chief executive, but he is not the law. He swears allegiance to the law, to the Constitution itself. And the text of that Constitution systematically strips royal prerogatives from any person and from every branch of government.

... If Americans want to provide the president with a version of the royal immunity that protected the monarchs of old, they can choose to do so through a constitutional amendment. Otherwise, presidents should remain subject to the rule of law, and not simply when they’re engaged in private conduct.

If the corrupt Supremes insist Donald Trump enjoys the immunities of a king, a goodly majority of us are likely to join our forbears in wondering: "when in the course of human events ..."

Chronicles from our rickety democratic experiment

Carlos Lozada has made a career of reading and dissecting the print output of our political system, first at the Washington Post, now at the New York Times. Whenever I see his byline, I'll jump to take a look. I find his work almost invariably interesting. In The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, he assembles a collection he considers enduringly relevant to his readers.

I'm a Washington journalist, but I don't interview politicians or cover foreign policy. I don't report on Congress or break news about government agencies. I don't dig up classified documents, and I certainly don't meet secret sources in parking garages.

Instead, I read.

He explains why he thinks there is value in the exercise:

... here's the real reason to read these books no matter how carefully these politicians sanitize their experiences and positions and records, no matter how diligently they present themselves in the best and safest most electable or confirmable light -- they almost always end up revealing themselves. Whether they mean to or not, in their books, they tell us who they really are.

Well, at least they do to Lozada, their diligent reader, who extracts a picture of who they really might be. He has a wonderful knack for the telling detail -- or excision -- from self-aggrandizing narrative. He shares his methods:

When you're reading a Washington book, you must look for the go-to lines, the rhetorical crutches that politicians lean on. ...

... Remember, it's only when life is wretched that presidents reach for Lincoln. In good times, no one gives a damn about our better angels.

... always read the acknowledgments section. That is where politicians disclose their debts, scratch backs, suck up, and snub. ...

Lozada follows this with an example of the fruits of such careful reading which also reveals what makes this volume so occasionally delicious; he excels at snark.

By far my favorite acknowledgments moment in a political book comes in American Dreams, the 2015 memoir by Sen. Marco Rubio. The first person that Rubio thanks by name is "my Lord, Jesus Christ, whose willingness to suffer and die for my sins will allow me to enjoy eternal life."

The second person Rubio thanks? "My very wise lawyer Bob Barnett."

But, more seriously, take this bit discussing the Congressional January 6 report:

That Trump would rile people up and then sit back and watch the outcome on television was the least surprising part of the day. It was how he spent his presidency. ...

Or this:

In retrospect, the Mueller Report was a cry for help. ...

Having actually made myself read that long volume, I could not agree more.

More of 2024, there's this which calls for believing what pols tell us:

The contrast between Biden saying America is still a democracy and Trump vowing to make it great again is more than a quirk of speechwriting. What presidents say -- especially what they grow comfortable repeating -- can reveal their underlying beliefs and impulses, shaping their administrations in ways that are concrete, not just rhetorical. Biden's "still" stresses durability; Trump's "again" revels in discontinuity. "Still" is about holding on to something good that may be slipping away; "again"  is about bringing back something better that was wrested away. ...

I would not suggest reading this volume the way I did, under the pressure of a library deadline. The episodic essays deserve to be savored. You won't like all of them, but Lozada has invented a fascinating role for a journalist. He's a lapidary stylist. Enjoy.

This is not a Christian nation

If it were, neither of these tidbits from mainstream media would have been considered necessary explanation by their editors. I trust my many Christian readers will find these as horrifying, yet also humorous, as I did.

A bipartisan push in Congress to enact a law cracking down on antisemitic speech on college campuses has prompted a backlash from far-right lawmakers and activists, who argue it could outlaw Christian biblical teachings. ...

... in trying to use the issue as a political cudgel against the left, Republicans also called attention to a rift on the right. Some G.O.P. members said they firmly believe that Jews killed Jesus Christ, and argued that the bill — which includes such claims in its definition of antisemitism — would outlaw parts of the Bible. 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said she opposed the bill because it “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” -- New York Times

This one is even more reflective of our times; TPM readers are -- correctly I think -- assumed to need cultural education to understand why many Christians might indulge in antisemitism. Hence these explanatory paragraphs:

Christ, who Christians revere as the son of God, was a Jewish religious figure who lived in the ancient Roman province of Judaea, which was largely located in what is currently Israel and the Palestinian territories. His teachings and growing following caused tensions with the established Roman and Jewish religious leaders in the province. Christ was ultimately crucified in the first century by the province’s Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

While some Jewish religious leaders and people in the province urged on the crucifixion, it was ordered by the Roman leader. The Christian Bible also describes many Jews who were distressed by Christ’s execution. -- Talking Points Memo

This country has come a long way toward genuine pluralism. We Christians are some among many. It's on that basis that I can like this country. Antisemitic loosely Bible-derived beliefs are dangerous to humanity. It's part of our job to combat the wackadoodles in our own tribe.

There's an arc to campus protests

A glance at Derf Backderf's meticulously researched graphic novel Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio seems right on time today.

This artist really did the work, in archives and interviews, to reconstruct the events of the Ohio college massacre on May 4, 1970. A barrage of gun fire from National Guard troops killed four students and maimed more in response to student protests. He tries to portray accurately what students, politicians, cops, and Guardsmen were thinking as the movement against the ongoing Vietnam war both intensified and shifted focus under ham-handed state repression. Overall theme: nobody really knew what they were doing!

Here are a few panels (click to enlarge):

Spring had come and students enjoyed the campus's grassy open lawn.

"Out of the bars and into the streets." During a boisterous evening in town on Friday night, some students interrupted a night of drinking and cruising to take common chants into the streets. The town police department had no idea what to do and bashed heads while intoxicated student rioters smashed store fronts.

The town called in the National Guard. No one seemed to know quite how to act in the aftermath.

Non-campus actors believed all sorts of myths about the mysterious campus activities. What had got into these kids?

For the students, their occupied campus was novel and insulting.

On Monday on campus, a small fraction of students reverted what they had been doing for weeks -- marching in protest. Students had a new target - the occupation of their turf by tired, frustrated, and uncomprehending troops. Many of the Guardsmen despised students they saw as privileged snots.

And so tragedy. A random crew of students were dead; all sides told their own stories. No one was punished. At the time, 58 percent of Americans thought the protesters had it coming to them.

I can highly recommended Backderf's reconstruction of Kent State events, much more detailed and nuanced than what I've offered here.

The book is not a great graphic novel because, for all the artist's efforts, all these characters seem to blend into each other, classic hippies in one stereotype and malevolent pols in another. He could probably have created a clearer visual experience with a lot of editing, but he's determined to report all the available historical strands and the result is not pictures which are easily understood. But this is a terrific effort to tell a complex story.

I got the book from the public library; I hope it is readily available in this moment.

• • •

A few observations from having lived similar events at UC Berkeley during attendance there from 1965-1969 and watching student protests over Gaza today:

• As at Kent State, most students can and do navigate around the edges of passionate protests, going about their lives. They may sympathize, but they are not there. The passionate activists are usually a small minority.

• Repression of campus protests draws a far larger fraction of students (and profs and staff) into the protests, for good and ill. College students, at least back then and likely still, come to think of campus as their place and broadly resent being invaded.

• This can create incentives among a small fraction of protesters to try to create a situation in which cops or others beat protesters' heads. I'm not saying that is all that goes on, but there are always provocateurs, some honest and some not.

• When under attack on campus, it becomes hard for protest leaders to keep the focus on the initial animating issue -- today the call for a Gaza ceasefire and for an end to US complicity in Israel's oppression of Palestinians. If the issue becomes mean cops, the movement is losing.

• Protest leadership demands teaching serious protest discipline. This is hard because the aim is to grow fast. And also, the power of campus protest is attractive moral creativity; apparent rigid automatons chanting only approved messages do not attract.

And we'd be a far worse country if students could never be moved by atrocity. So far, we seem to be that kind of country.

Friday cat blogging

 The war in Ukraine keeps providing amazing photos of cats.

You wouldn't think they'd take to war. But they do seem willing to adopt human friends.

Via The Counteroffensive.

Is Hakeem Jeffries the real Speaker of the House of Representatives?

No, he's not. Jeffries remains the Democratic House Minority Leader. 

Republican Mike Johnson is the Speaker, leading a one vote majority with Marjorie Taylor Greene and other far right lunatics nipping at this heels. It's a precarious perch. But Jeffries has managed to win a commanding position in the current Congress by means of cross party legislative legerdemain.

Russell Berman describes the arrangement with Jeffries that is keeping Johnson in his current job:

... in an unusual statement, the leaders of the Democratic opposition emerged from a party meeting to declare that they would rescue Johnson if the speaker’s main Republican enemy at the moment, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, forced a vote to oust him. ... by thwarting Greene’s motion to vacate, Democrats hope they can ensure that Johnson will keep turning to them for the next seven months of his term rather than seek votes from conservative hard-liners who will push legislation ever further to the right.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY

For the sake of historical memory, it seems worth recalling that former California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown pulled off similar legislative wizardry in the mid-1990s. Brown served as Democratic Assembly leader for fifteen years, using his near absolute power over his caucus to advance civil rights and to raise the cash to elect Democrats. The push for legislative term limits in the state -- passed by voter initiative in 1990 -- was often described as the only way to pry Willie Brown out of the job.

In 1994, as the new term limits led to a bit of legislative turnover, for the first time in decades, Republicans seized a one vote majority in the state Assembly. But Brown wasn't about to let them take over "his" house. First he persuaded a dissident Republican, Paul Horcher, to turn independent and vote to keep him as Speaker. Horcher was quickly recalled by his Republican district. (Horcher stayed in Brown's orbit; when Brown was later mayor of San Francisco, Horcher worked in department of parking and traffic.)

After Horcher was deposed, Brown worked his magic to hang on yet longer. He persuaded another disgruntled Republican member, Doris Allen, to take the title of Speaker, for the next six months. But her power consisted of Brown's control of the Democratic Caucus. After this, Dems again won the Assembly majority and that was that.

The California legislature only saw the last of Willie Brown when term limits sent him off to be "da Mayor" in San Francisco.

If Democrats win the House in November -- a strong possibility if we do the work -- then Hakeem Jeffries will be elected the actual Speaker. But he's certainly proving a worthy successor to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her mentor Willie Brown in this interregnum. 

• • •

I have to add that Willie Brown's later influence was extremely malign on the city I love . His mayoral tenure was both corrupt and indifferent to majority who were too poor to offer much to him and his friends. He governed for the civic fat cats and left of a legacy of subsequent lesser imitators. But he sure was a phenomenal leader of the Assembly in his day.

An unexpected source of support for US aid to Ukraine

How about some elements of the religious right?

Most of us who don't live their world miss nuances and small fissures in evangelical support for Trumpism. These aren't our people and their information diet is not ours.

But informed observers think that Republican Congressional Speaker Mike Johnson's willingness to allow a majority vote for aid to Ukraine derived, in part, from rightwing Christians' awareness that Russian invaders are persecuting their kind. Russia wants to impose a Russian flavor of Orthodox Christianity under the Moscow Patriarch. 

Historian of Christian religion Diana Butler Bass has flagged the resulting conflict:

When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson pushed through aid to Ukraine ..., it did more than green-light funds to support the Ukrainians. In recent weeks, he changed from hard-core opposition to supporting Ukraine to championing its cause. His actions were, of course, political and personal, but they also signal a genuine conflict within American evangelicalism, one that could come to have ramifications for the upcoming presidential elections.

... While 77% of evangelicals supported Ukraine when Russia invaded, that enthusiasm eroded over the next two years. ... In general, American evangelical public opinion became clouded. It appears that in the last two years, the more evangelicals committed to Christian nationalism as a political movement, the more they began to back away from Ukraine and re-embrace Vladimir Putin. As a result, evangelical opposition to Ukraine and support for Russia essentially took over the issue. ... By November 2023, however, pro-Ukraine groups figured out the key to American aid in their war was swaying evangelicals. ...

The number of stories about Russian persecution of evangelicals appearing in the religion press increased. A good example of this can be found in The Baptist Press — their Ukraine coverage increased in its political content, urgency, and frequency beginning in the autumn of 2023 through this spring.

 Sarah Posner is a leading student of America's religious right. She sees Mike Johnson shoring up his base against purer nihilists like Marjorie Taylor Greene:

Greene and her fellow ideologues may want to tread carefully. There is a growing backlash on the Christian right against the move to oust Johnson. While Greene’s MAGA influencer antics garner significant media attention, people with longtime clout in the evangelical political trenches, including Johnson himself, have been waging a quiet but scathing war against her in Christian media. The GOP’s evangelical base — vital to Republican hopes in the fall — is hearing that Greene is groundlessly attacking a godly man and imperiling the party’s election chances, thus bringing (in Johnson’s words) the Democrats’ “crazy woke agenda” closer to fruition. 

Worship in a Baptist congregation in the village of Gat in Ukraine. (Photo: European Baptist Federation)

Meanwhile, divisions over Russian persecution of Ukrainian Baptists and others have come to the American home front. Catherine Wanner, a professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, explains:

I'm a professor at Penn State ... so I live in rural central Pennsylvania, where there happens to be a Baptist mega church. It used to be called the Russian Baptist Church – they changed their name after 2022. They are now the Salvation Baptist Church. The majority of members are either Ukrainians, Russians, or Russian speakers, and this community itself has fractured; it has divided in two. While there was universal agreement that the war should be condemned in no uncertain terms and that Russia is the aggressor in this case, the issue that prompted this community to split was over how one should pray for suffering co-religionists.

The Russians and the Russian speakers argued that the restrictive atmosphere in Russia was such that there was immense suffering among Russian Baptists in Russia, and so the suffering of Russian Baptist should be equated with Ukrainian Baptists, and the two should be prayed for on equal terms. The Ukrainians, those from Ukraine, said no. The suffering of Ukrainians is primarily at the hands of their Russian brethren, who are waging war and shelling Ukrainians every day and destroying Baptist communities throughout Ukraine.

And so, it was over the issue of how to recognize the suffering of both Baptists in Russia and Baptists in Ukraine that prompted this community to experience conflicts such that they split. This is my way of saying that these conflicts are not limited to the occupied territories in Ukraine where they are most acutely experienced, but they reverberate in communities in rural central Pennsylvania, which has a significant number of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and specifically from Ukraine – as does our neighboring state, Ohio, and Michigan beyond it. 

The U.S. religious right is paying attention to such divisions, to the benefit of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression. Can the rest of us listen up as well?

The tiny dinosaurs we share a world with

Don't miss this current article from Erudite Partner in the LA Progressive:

... Many of us, myself included a few times a year, do eat birds, but an extraordinary number of people all over the world are also beguiled and delighted by them in their wild state. People deeper into bird culture than I am make a distinction between birdwatchers — anyone who pays a bit of attention to birds and can perhaps identify a few local species like the handsome rock dove, better known as a pigeon — and birders, people who devote time (and often money) to the practice, who may travel to see particular birds, and who most likely maintain a birding life list of every species they’ve spotted.

Mandy and Lara Sirdah of Gaza City are birders. Those twin sisters, now in their late forties, started photographing birds in their backyard almost a decade ago....

If it weren’t for the Israeli occupation — and now the full-scale war ... Gaza would be ideal for birding. ...

Who knew? -- don't you want to know more? I certainly did.

I don't see women putting up with this indefinitely

A cry from rural Missouri.

Tender feelings among phony "conservatives" underlie assault on democracy

The right wing Heritage Foundation has undertaken to mobilize a broad swath of conservative academics and a goodly number of cranks to write a blueprint for a prospective Trump administration. They call it Project 2025. The document has been widely reported on; if you are a real glutton for punishment, you can download it yourself, though I doubt anyone else is much up for 900 pages of this stuff. 

European political scientist Thomas Zimmer, who is a visiting prof at Georgetown University, is closely observing the U.S. scene. He provides this commentary on the plan:

There is a nervous energy on the Right. A volatile mix of desperation and enthusiasm, delusions of grandeur and a feeling of impending doom – all of it being channeled into a feverish effort to devise detailed plans and strategies, policy agendas, personnel databases, and emergency “playbooks” for a return to power.

... reactionaries are actually united by the desire to punish their enemies, “take back” the country, and restore the “natural order” of unquestioned white Christian patriarchal rule – a unity that is indicative of a broader realignment on the Right towards an aggressive embrace of state authoritarianism. ...

This tendency to embrace the coercive powers of the state as long as they were deployed in service of the rightwing agenda has escalated in the more recent past, as the sense of being under siege as a persecuted minority in their own country has radicalized on the Right. Conservative elites have always cultivated a sense of (self-)victimization, have displayed a remarkable persecution complex even while holding disproportionate power, at least politically and economically, often focused on the cultural sphere they didn’t manage to dominate.

Until quite recently, this overall feeling among conservatives of being victimized was accompanied by a sense of representing the majority will of the people – of having the infamous “silent majority” on their side. The “silent majority” idea was obviously based on a racialized conception of America’s true volk. It was the majority of only those who *really* counted the Right claimed or cared to represent – a group that was predominantly white, Christian, and espoused certain conservative values and sensibilities that were coded as authentically American. And yet, the “silent majority” chimera at least paid lip service to some notion of majoritarian government and therefore, at least rhetorically, recognized democratic principles. That’s completely gone, in theory and practice.

Conservatives have basically moved from criticizing “big government” and “activist judges” for going against the will of the “silent majority” to declaring the majority illegitimate and accusing it of assaulting the natural order as justification for their attempts to entrench minoritarian rule by whatever means.

... this would not be the same Right that came to power in 2017. That starts with Trump himself. The idea that he has always been the same, just Trump being Trump, is massively misleading and obscures the rather drastic radicalization of the Right’s undisputed leader. Beyond Trump, the Right more generally has significantly radicalized. The idea that more drastic action is urgently needed has been spreading fast into the center of conservative politics. The summer of 2020, specifically, escalated this perception of imminent threat: It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to view the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd as supposedly irrefutable proof that “the Left” has started its full-on assault, justifying calls for ever more extreme action in response. This radicalization has found its manifestation in the Republican Party.

... The best approach to understanding the Right has always been to take seriously and actually grapple with their vision for American society. In that sense, “Project 2025” is tremendously helpful. Rightwing leaders could not possibly be clearer about the reactionary vision they want to impose on the country. They are telling us that they do not accept this egalitarian, pluralistic idea of a society in which the individual’s status is no longer determined by race, gender, religion, and wealth. They feel justified in taking truly radical, extreme measures to prevent that society from ever becoming a reality because they believe they are defending “real America” in service of a higher purpose: To restore and entrench what they see as the natural order and divine will, as it manifests in strict, discriminatory hierarchies.

The reactionary mobilization against democratic multiracial pluralism won’t stop because the people behind it have some sort of epiphany that they shouldn’t go *that* far. It will either *be stopped* or succeed in entrenching white Christian patriarchal rule – and install a system in which only they and those who reflect their image back at them are entitled to rule and be recognized as equal.

Scary stuff. As is usual when previously unchallenged dominant men let themselves be governed by fear. Also, all too much like the BS that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was peddling the other day in the arguments over whether a president should enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for illegal acts aiming to stay in power.

Demagogues, ideologues, racists, and grifters past

The dire prospect of yet another Trump campaign season brings out historical-political observers who remind us that destructive populist energy run amuck in the Republican Party is nothing new.

Trump is not a unique figure in American history. In each generation, anti-liberal forces have turned to the same breed of demagogue, the flouter of norms, the boorish trampler of liberal nostrums. William Buckley noted that the very “uncouthness” of George Wallace seemed to “account for his general popularity.” James Burnham marveled at how Joseph McCarthy’s “inept acts and ignorant words” had a “charismatic” quality that well expressed the fears and angers of his devoted followers.

What their critics saw as boorishness and malevolence, however, their followers saw as strength and defiance against a liberal system stacked against them. They were rebellious opponents of the system, “wreckers,” unabashedly anti-liberal in both thought and manner, and that is precisely what made them popular among a broad swath of White Americans who felt themselves losing ground in the culture and society... -- Robert Kagan 

• • •

The fact is that for a very long time—longer than I’ve been alive—the Republican Party has been motivated by the drive to tap into and mobilize populist energy bubbling up from the “grassroots” and then ride it to power. Populism in this sense is a revolutionary impulse—a drive to rise up in rage-filled rebellion against entrenched, established powers, allies against enemies, us against them. Barry Goldwater was the first to attempt it. -- Damon Linker

Looking back from our moment, Rick Perlstein's 2001 history, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, fills in the record of one episode in the GOP's long course of replacing most policy goals with rage-driven rebellion against modern American life.  

In 1964, right wing operatives -- John Birch Society and other fringe-ish cranks -- needed a standard bearer if they were going to break into the mainstream. Senator Goldwater was a far right libertarian out of phase with the eastern, capitalist, urban leadership of the Republican Party. He looked strong and was seriously ambitious, but also was determined to do things his own way. 

The election was always going to be tough for Republicans -- the incumbent Lyndon Johnson had inherited the presidency from the assassinated John Kennedy. People were still reeling from the shock. But the war in Vietnam was heating up and the non-violent movement for African American rights and dignity had escaped the South, leading to urban unrest. There might have been an opening for a less divisive Republican, Johnson was a master of turning social unease to his advantage (and in many respects was a pretty darn good president for most citizens).

According to Perlstein, the right wing outsiders organized highly competently to get Goldwater nominated at a populist GOP convention. But they never managed to entirely take over the campaign apparatus. So during the run up to the vote, it was often as if the populist grassroots were running in parallel to, rather than pushing from behind, their champion. There was plenty of venting of white rage and fear, but Johnson was able to use this energy against the Republican, defining Goldwater as a war-mongering menace.

The numbers were spectacular: 43,126,218 votes for Johnson to 27,174,898 for Goldwater, who won only six states -- one of them, Arizona, by half a percent.

Democrats cleaned up down ballot as well, winning overwhelming advantages in Congress. In consequence, in 1965, they passed Medicare and the Voting Rights Act which enabled Black suffrage (until the current Supreme Court killed it off).

Perlstein writes a very detailed narrative of these events, fascinating if the nuts and bolts of political campaigns interest the reader. In reading such history, I'm always reminded that though the technology of campaigning changes, its essence -- harnessing mass political energies into effective action -- remains the same. 

Where and how might you work to defeat Trump's current right wing threat this fall? (I'm still figuring it out.)

• • •

In 1964, when the radical right John Birch Society was near the peak of its influence, renowned journalist Martha Gellhorn, who had launched her career covering the Spanish civil war three decades earlier, wrote a friend: “Unless there’s a Johnson landslide, the country and world will know how many incipient and energetic home-grown Fascists we have. I never for a moment feared Communism in the US but have always feared Fascism; it’s a real American trait. -- via Karen Tumulty