From now on our troubles will be out of sight

I don't care if he's doing it for the wrong reason. If Trump gets rid of the debt ceiling, it will be good, because, as Dday says, "The Debt Limit Should Absolutely Be Eliminated: Trump is offering the deal of a lifetime. We've gotten a preview of the next four years in the space of a few hours on Wednesday. Elon Musk provided the shock troops to topple an end-of-year spending deal, and Donald Trump provided the final blow. To say the commotion was based on rumor and myth would be an insult to rumor and myth; even now, Trump is calling for a 'clean' funding bill while keeping the $100 billion in disaster funding and $30 billion for farmers, which comprises virtually all of the additions from a monetary standpoint. But Trump also added an entirely new demand: take the debt limit off the table, rather than forcing him to deal with it next year. And he doesn't just want the debt limit raised; he explicitly wants it eliminated. 'The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,' Trump told NBC News. Let's not overthink this. Regardless of who suggested it, any day we can say goodbye to the stupidest element of our political structure is a good day."

The suspected assassin of the United CEO, turned into a folk hero instantly, appears to be someone called Luigi Mangione from Maryland, and he even had a sort of "manifesto" handy. Or what some people would term a "note". The major media has copies but for some unexplained reason have refused to publish it. So Ken Klippenstein got hold of it and posted it on Substack. "To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty." The Unibomber's manifesto was much longer and the WaPo and NYT had no trouble publishing that. They don't want to use photos that show his face, either. (Thomas Neuberger thinks he knows why.)

"Supreme court agrees to hear TikTok challenge to law ending its US operations: The US supreme court said on Wednesday that it would hear TikTok's challenge to a law that could make the company's popular video app disappear from the US. In its order on Wednesday, the supreme court said it would set aside two hours for oral arguments on 10 January to consider TikTok's lawsuit against the justice department and the attorney general, Merrick Garland. TikTok issued a statement in response to the court agreeing to take up its case: 'We're pleased with today's supreme court order. We believe the court will find the TikTok ban unconstitutional so the over 170 million Americans on our platform can continue to exercise their free speech rights.' The law that will either ban TikTok or force the sale of the app is set to go into effect on 19 January. A federal appeals court in Washington DC rejected ByteDance's argument earlier this month that the law violated the free speech provision of the US constitution's first amendment. The ruling allows the law, passed in April, to remain in place."

There's a lot of mush going around that purports to explain that it's not the insurance companies' fault, but Matt Stoller puts it right, "It's Time to Break Up Big Medicine: UnitedHealth Group is not an insurer, it's a platform. And it's in the crosshairs as Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley propose breaking it apart, severing its pharmacy arm from the rest of the business [...] These kinds of discussions are always done in bad faith, since people who make a lot of money from killing people with spreadsheets like to pretend to be very offended when anyone points out health care is a matter of life and death. That said, moral hypocrisy isn't the primary reason our health care system is so problematic. A more important objection to reform is from a certain dominant strain of thinking among economists and health care wonks, who question whether the health insurers are really that bad. [...] It turns out the reason health care costs kept going up despite the reforms meant to reverse the trendline is because policymakers misdiagnosed the underlying problem. The Dartmouth work was just wrong on overuse of medicine. Higher medical costs in America were result of, you guessed it, monopoly power."

"Coalition of Missouri businesses attempting to override new minimum wage, paid sick leave laws: Almost immediately after voters in Missouri signed onto Proposition A, a referendum that would state-wide increase of the minimum wage and mandatory paid sick leave, a collection of business associations announced they would explore ways to subvert the November results. The coalition is crying election fraud despite an overwhelming 58% of voters approving the measure."

I wasn't bothered when Biden pardoned his son, because, let's face it, he never would have been charged in the first place if he hadn't been a Democratic president's son. But this really does go beyond the pale: "Victims of 'kids-for-cash' judge outraged by Biden pardon: 'What about all of us?' Victims of a former Pennsylvania judge convicted in the so-called kids-for-cash scandal are outraged by Joe Biden's decision to grant him clemency. In 2011, Michael Conahan was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison after he and another judge, Mark Ciavarella, were found guilty of accepting $2.8m in illegal payments in exchange for sending more than 2,300 children – including some as young as eight years old – to private juvenile detention centers. Conahan was released from prison in 2020 due to Covid-19 and placed on house arrest, which had been scheduled to end in 2026. Conahan's sentence was one of about 1,500 the US president commuted – or shortened – on Thursday while also pardoning 39 Americans who had been convicted of non-violent crimes." I actually find it hard to see that as a non-violent crime.

Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect says it's looking good, "The Face of the Democratic Party: The next DNC chair will have a higher profile than usual. The two leading candidates, Ken Martin of Minnesota and Ben Wikler of Wisconsin, are both terrific. It's hard to think of a time when the Democratic Party was more bereft of real leaders. As the losing presidential candidate, Kamala Harris is not held in warm regard, and her continuing fundraising efforts have added to the irritation. Joe Biden, who accomplished more than his critics give him credit for, is going out on a low note. Usually, the chair of the Democratic National Committee is a technocrat and not the face of the party. But this time could be different. A number of names have been mentioned in the press coverage and in self-promotion, but it's clear that the two finalists will be Ken Martin, 51, Minnesota party chair, and his neighbor, Ben Wikler, 43, who chairs the Wisconsin state party. Both are excellent party-builders, both are substantive progressives, and both have earned wide respect. The election is set for February 1." On the other hand, One other party leadership post is open, and here the news is terrible. Michigan Sen. Gary Peters is stepping down as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the fundraising arm of the Senate Democratic caucus. The only declared candidate for the job is New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Gillibrand, in contrast to Martin and Wikler, represents all that is corrupt and opportunistic in the Democratic Party. She is very close to the crypto industry, which dumped scads of dark money into late campaign ads to defeat progressives such as Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Gillibrand also is widely loathed for leading the campaign to hound Sen. Al Franken out of office on charges of sexual harassment. Gillibrand will get the job mainly because nobody else wants it."

On the other hand, the Free Speech Warriors are still remarkably silent on "The Coming Threats to Press Freedom: Watch out for massive libel suits, efforts to repeal Times v. Sullivan, and an attempt to create an official secrets act—as Trump and MAGA flood the First Amendment zone. As the house optimist, I keep finding intact democratic guardrails and weaknesses in Trump's attempt to impose a dictatorship. But this is the one that really keeps me up at night. Traditional press freedom is already at risk because of the travesty of what so much of the media has become. It's not clear what sort of First Amendment protections the shabbier forms of social media even deserve. But with the second coming of Trump, it's the mainstream fact-based media that's in the crosshairs. What's gotten the most attention lately are Trump's own threats to sue for libel and a few actual suits. These are mostly outlandish, but sufficiently serious to have caused legacy media to pay protection money."

Krugman leaves The New York Times and starts his own Substack, Krugman wonks out, which is currently free to read. "The Fraudulence of 'Waste, Fraud and Abuse': Once upon a time a Republican president, sure that large parts of federal spending were worthless, appointed a commission led by a wealthy businessman to bring a business sensibility to the budget, going through it line by line to identify inefficiency and waste. The commission initially made a big splash, and there were desperate attempts to spin its work as a success. But in the end few people were fooled. Ronald Reagan's venture, the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control — the so-called 'Grace commission,' headed by J. Peter Grace — was a flop, making no visible dent in spending." I wonder if we'll see any change from Krugman now that he doesn't have a boss.

"The Far-right Activist Who Sparked an Imaginary Pogrom in Stockholm [...] The online news site Mako reported that Jews were attacked 'in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, during a ceremony commemorating the Kristallnacht pogrom.' It said anti-Israel demonstrators yelled derogatory names at the ceremony's participants, snatched their Israeli flags, tore them up and threw them into the river. [...] In the real world, what happened in Stockholm is indeed troubling, but for different reasons. First, no ceremony commemorating Kristallnacht took place there. Second, no Jews were attacked. Third, this false information was disseminated by people who counted on the media to spread the lie, thereby providing them with free political propaganda. And they were right. The Swedish media refused to buy the goods, but the Israeli media sure did (I might add, for the benefit of Mako's investigative reporters, that Stockholm doesn't have a river)."

Also from Haaretz, "It's Time for Israel to Grant the Black Hebrew Israelite Community the Full Rights It Deserves: The Hebrew Israelite community marked an unfortunate milestone last week, when it lost its first member in combat, Elishai Young, a 19-year-old conscript from Dimona. He was buried last Monday. Some at the funeral expressed the irony that while Elishai was born in Israel and died defending the country, he was not eligible to be an Israeli citizen. That's because Hebrew Israelis are still engaged in a struggle for full recognition that began with the first arrivals in 1969."

"Eviction and Voter Turnout: The Political Consequences of Housing Instability: In recent years, housing costs have outpaced incomes in the United States, resulting in millions of eviction filings each year. Yet no study has examined the link between eviction and voting. Drawing on a novel data set that combines tens of millions of eviction and voting records, this article finds that residential eviction rates negatively impacted voter turnout during the 2016 presidential election. Results from a generalized additive model show eviction's effect on voter turnout to be strongest in neighborhoods with relatively low rates of displacement. To address endogeneity bias and estimate the causal effect of eviction on voting, the analysis treats commercial evictions as an instrument for residential evictions, finding that increases in neighborhood eviction rates led to substantial declines in voter turnout. This study demonstrates that the impact of eviction reverberates far beyond housing loss, affecting democratic participation."

More Perfect Union's survey on "Taking on Corporate Power sure seems to indicate that Americans want to see corporate power reduced.

"Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data: (Reuters) - A new report adds to a growing line of research showing that police departments don't solve serious or violent crimes with any regularity, and in fact, spend very little time on crime control, in contrast to popular narratives."

"There's Nothing More Corrupting Than Flying Private: Want to understand the motives of our mercenary elite? Take a trip on a private plane, writes Tina Brown."

Speaking of corruption, there are now 11 episodes of Master Plan and you really shouldn't miss this historical rollercoaster ride through the plot for the rich mob to take over the country.

An artist I recently noticed, Richard Savoie (Canadian, 1959), might be fun to investigate, although I wish his own website had a more comprehensive gallery display.

I ran into this YouTube economist called Unlearning Economics because Nathan Robinson interviewed him about his video "Thomas Sowell Is Worse Than I thought," which sounded pretty irresistible so I watched it, and now I'm watching "Free Stuff Is Good, Actually."

A couple of decades back I posted a clip of one of my favorite scenes from the original film of Bedazzled, but it was during that period when the remake was in release so they got YouTube to take it down. But later on, someone else posted it, so enjoy a few minutes of Peter Cook (as the Devil, aka George Spigot) explaining to Dudley Moore (a burger-flipper) why he got kicked out of Heaven.

I'm not sure whether I approve of this version, but "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," with John Legend and Esperanza Spalding.

That is their song

Sorry I missed Advent, but your traditional Advent music is yet another version of "Carol of the Bells". Celebrate the season in warmth and light.

The last few days have seen a flurry of international events that I haven't really been able to process yet. Assad is out of Syria, apparently to be replaced by an Al Quaeda leader once declared a terrorist enemy by the United States—but some say the US is responsible for what was not a natural, organic "revolution". For many, this is just a part of Israel's expansionist policies. Bashar al Assad is reported now to be taking refuge in Moscow.

South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law for no apparent reason, but it was over by morning. Some say that was thanks to the call of strikes from unions, but in any case the parliament managed to get inside to reverse him. Although that vote had cross-party support, the calls for impeachment did not and so far he has managed to avoid it, although everyone outside of his own party seems to be demanding impeachment or resignation. Much of the world was surprised to find out just how unpopular this guy is.

Meanwhile in France, Macron's antidemocratic decision to put a right-wing "centrist" in the prime ministership to defeat the left seems to have backfired, and now he's left with the choice of continuing his arrogance or doing what he should have done in the first place: "A more durable, and ethical, solution would be for Mr Macron to finally demonstrate the humility he should have shown after the chastening outcome of his summer gamble. The July snap poll was narrowly, but indubitably, won by the New Popular Front (NPF) – a leftwing alliance including the Socialist party and Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Unbowed. Fearing that an NPF-led government would attempt to reverse parts of his legacy, including deeply unpopular plans to raise the retirement age, Mr Macron found reasons not to appoint a prime minister from the broad left." People are holding their breath to see if he will finally do it.

Back in the New York, the CEO of America's most rapacious health insurers was assasinated, and the lack of opprobrium from the public seems to be the real story here. "Brian Thompson's killing inspired rage – against the healthcare industry: The killing appeared so well-planned that at first glance many assumed it was a professional hit. The gunman who shot dead Brian Thompson, head of one of the US's largest health insurance companies, on a New York street before dawn lay in wait with a weapon fitted with a silencer, kept his cool as his gun jammed and made a nimble escape after ensuring that his victim had been fatally struck. However, within hours, an intense police manhunt turned up a trail of clues and possible mistakes, suggesting that while the killer had taken care to cover his tracks, he also made amateurish missteps that may yet lead to his identification and capture. But millions of Americans were less interested in the mechanics of what New York's new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, called “a premeditated, pre-planned, targeted attack” than the possible motive. Despite the fact the killer's motive remains completely unknown, the death of UnitedHealthcare's CEO unleashed an eruption of anger from people mistreated, or untreated, by the US's rapacious medical industry and even a grim schadenfreude from some at Thompson's death."

"US House passes bill to punish non-profits deemed to support 'terrorism'." Well, we knew this was going to happen, but I still haven't seen the Free Speech Warriors speaking out against it.

Two unfortunate facts: One is that Bill Clinton signed some odious Republican legislation into law, and one of them allows the next president to overturn rules made in the last 60 days of his predecessor's term. The other is that Joe Biden did some rule-making in the last 60 days of his term that he really should have gotten to earlier. "The Biden Reforms That Will Be First To Go: Thanks to Republican deregulatory frenzy and Democratic gambles, many key consumer-protection initiatives could soon be wiped away. [...] The CRA's 'lookback period' only allows the law to be used to rescind rules established in the last 60 working 'pro forma' days of a lawmaking session and the subsequent remaining days of a president's term. Goldbeck said that the exact date is 'kind of a moving target,' but most experts agree that once Trump assumes office on Jan. 20, 2025, the CRA could be used to revoke any rules passed after Aug. 1, 2024."

"The War on Consortium News: From PayPal to Global News to anonymous hackers, there are forces that prefer you don't read Consortium News. In an age of growing censorship and suppression of news, Consortium News is not exaggerating when it says it has abundant evidence of efforts to marginalize or silence us."

Good news from Wisconsin! "Act 10 Overturned." This is Scott Walker's anti-union legislation from back in 2003. Everyone was horrified, but it has taken this long to get it to court, and the court said Act 10 didn't pass muster.

Stiglitz in the Guardian, "The message to Democrats is clear: you must dump neoliberal economics: As the shock of Donald Trump's victory sinks in, pundits and politicians are mulling what it means for the future of the US and global politics. Understanding why such a divisive, unqualified figure won again is crucial for the Democrats. Did they go too far left and lose the moderate Americans who make up a majority? Or did centrist neoliberalism – pursued by Democratic presidents since Bill Clinton – fail to deliver, thus creating a demand for change? To me, the answer is clear: 40 years of neoliberalism have left the US with unprecedented inequality, stagnation in the middle of the income spectrum (and worse for those below), and declining average life expectancy (highlighted by mounting “deaths of despair”). The American Dream is being killed, and although President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris distanced themselves from neoliberalism with their embrace of industrial policies, as representatives of the mainstream establishment, they remained associated with its legacy."

With handy stats and graphs: "Analysis: Kamala Harris Turned Away From Economic Populism: Pressed by influential corporate advisors, Kamala Harris ran away from a winning economic populist message and ended up losing a campaign. We have the proof. [...] The vice president's bid was premised on the risky bet that catering to moderate, college-educated voters would win more support than it would lose in working-class defections. That gamble backfired massively. Instead of expanding the Democratic coalition to bring in a larger share of the working-class vote in critical swing states where working-class voters make up a large majority of the electorate, Kamala Harris saw her only gains among college-educated white voters, and for the first time, Democrats received a higher share of votes from high- compared to low-income Americans. [...] Over the course of the whole campaign, Harris spoke less about economic issues and progressive economic policy priorities than Joe Biden had in 2020, and far less than Sanders had in the Democratic primaries that year. In this cycle, Trump addressed perhaps the most important issue for voters — prices and the cost of living — more than twice as often as Harris. "

RIP: Alice Brock - "The real Alice of Arlo Guthrie's 'Alice's Restaurant' dies at 83: The hippie-era icon who inspired folk singer Arlo Guthrie's epic, anti-establishment song “Alice's Restaurant” has died. Alice Brock suffered from health issues, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and passed away at a hospice home in Wellfleet on Thursday. She was 83. Brock's longtime close friend Viki Merrick was with her when she died. Merrick said up until the end Brock remained poetic, hilariously funny, and full of puns. 'That's the way Alice has always been.' The timing of Brock's passing is poignant. It's long been a Thanksgiving tradition for radio stations across the country to broadcast Guthrie's 18-minute spoken word ramble that made 'Alice' famous."

Doctorow, "The far right grows through 'disaster fantasies': The core of the prepper fantasy: 'What if the world ended in the precise way that made me the most important person?' The ultra-rich fantasize about emerging from luxury bunkers with an army of mercs and thumbdrives full of bitcoin to a world in ruins that they restructure using their 'leadership skills.' The ethnographer Rich Miller spent his career embedding with preppers, eventually writing the canonical book of the fantasies that power their obsessions, Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times. Miller recounts how the disasters that preppers prepare for are the disasters that will call upon their skills, like the water chemist who's devoted his life to preparing to help his community recover from a terrorist attack on its water supply; and who, when pressed, has no theory as to why any terrorist would stage such an attack. Prepping is what happens when you are consumed by the fantasy of a terrible omnicrisis that you can solve, personally. It's an individualistic fantasy, and that makes it inherently neoliberal. Neoliberalism's mind-zap is to convince us all that our only role in society is as an individual ('There is no such thing as society' – M. Thatcher)."

In These Times, "Democratic Elites Blame Everyone But Themselves for Historic Collapse: Understandably, the blame game for who was responsible for this collapse is quickly underway. But, just like with the post 2016 recriminations, the very same people driving the narrative of who is responsible are themselves largely responsible—or at least in and of the same media and political class as those who are. As a result, with rare exception, those being blamed are not Democratic Party elites, liberal media institutions, or the corporate consulting world they operate in—but outside economic forces, transgender people, immigrants, and a host of either powerless minority groups or vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless generalities."

Matt Stoller at The Lever, "How Democrats Learned To Love Losing: The Democratic Party has embraced a cult of powerlessness — and now they're taking down hugely popular antitrust policy along with it. For the last few weeks, I've been mulling over a question that I think will bedevil all of us in the antimonopoly space for years, perhaps decades. Antimonopoly policy is immensely popular, and there hasn't been an administration as aggressive on antitrust in our lifetimes as there was under Joe Biden. Yet, voters soundly rejected his successor, Kamala Harris, and thrashed the party in power. And while antimonopoly politics sits uneasily in the Democratic Party, that is where it sits. Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra, and Jonathan Kanter will be out of power soon. So what happened? And why did Democrats lose so badly? I don't think the answer is simple, nor is it right to characterize the problem as solely one involving the Democratic Party. In 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024, voters have voted against the incumbent party. If you look at the recriminations among Democrats, they reveal, unwittingly, a broad theme that I've noticed with roots that go back to the middle of the 20th century. And while these observations are focused on Democrats, people on the right will recognize in their institutions a similar set of challenges."

"U.S. officials who hated 'woke' investing won't stop buying Israel Bonds: Budget-strapped states and municipalities have accrued $1.7 billion dollars-worth of these dubious securities" They insisted it would be irresponsible to get involved with "woke" investments because they owed it to their constituents to make money for them, but that went out the window when they decided Israel was a deserving needy party.

Even the Cato Institute admits it, "Trump's Immigration Policies Made America Less Safe. Here's the Data."

Gratifying take-down of Yggy in Current Affairs, "Matt Yglesias Is Confidently Wrong About Everything: The Biden administration's favorite centrist pundit produces smug pseudo-analysis that cannot be considered serious thought. He ought to be permanently disregarded."

"Wildlife photographer of the year 2024 winners – in pictures"

One little miracle a day is all I need

I feel worse than I thought I would if this happened, even though I probably expected it more than a lot of lefties and Democrats did. The whole Cheney thing was the closest she could get to hugging Kissinger, saying she couldn't think of a single thing she'd do different from Biden was just stupid, refusing to let a single Palestinian endorse her was criminal political malpractice, and I just don't want to talk about it yet. I will point out that Rashida Tlaib massively out-performed Harris in Dearborn. And that Harris lost a bunch of crucial states she had been winning before her veer to the right.

"What Election Do These People Think We Just Had? Democrats are inventing wild fantasies about the power of Big Woke rather than confront the failures of their actual approach. The ugly truth for these people is that Kamala Harris ran as right-wing a campaign as any Democrat in living memory. She downplayed discussions of her race and gender. She bent over backward to welcome billionaires, corporate titans, and Republicans into the fold. She told Black men that one of her priorities for them was…crypto. She made her past as a prosecutor a cornerstone of her pitch. She bragged about owning a Glock and joked that she would shoot people who broke into her house. She stuffed the Democratic National Convention to the gills with cops and Border Patrol agents while crushing even the tiniest dissent over her support for the genocide in Gaza. She promised the most 'lethal' military in the world. She was seemingly joined at the hip with Liz Cheney for weeks. She even praised Dick Cheney! It's hard to think of what more she could have done to satisfy the people clamoring for her to pander to conservatives. But admitting that would mean that the CNN favorites and the anonymous politicos had to confront an even more uncomfortable reality: that, ideologically at least, Harris ran the campaign of their wildest dreams, and got crushed."

Branko Marcetic, "Democratic Party Elites Brought Us This Disaster: The story that is about to be pushed hard is that Kamala Harris lost because she was too far left. It will be pushed because this is the Democratic establishment's go-to explanation for all its failures. [...] For years now, voters have been telling pollsters that they were fed up with the economy, and poll after poll during this campaign registered them saying it was the issue that would most decide their vote, especially among those who were leaning toward Trump. This held across last night's exit polls. Across all seven battleground states and nationally, survey results were virtually the same: voters viewed the economy as the most important issue in the election; they felt their personal financial situation was worse and they thought so at significantly higher rates than they did in 2020; and huge majorities of those who voted for Trump viewed the economy negatively, considered it the election's most pressing issue, and voted for the person they thought was going to bring 'change.'"

"Exit Right: Trump has remade Americans, and to defeat Trumpism requires nothing less than the left doing the same. [...] In our century, American politics has been blown open by the reverberating crises of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization. They have rebounded on our society and politics in four major forms: imperial blowback and endless warfare; deindustrialization and the hollowing out of American society; the rise of an engorged, predatory, and increasingly insane billionaire class, obsessed with eugenics and immortality; and the climate crisis, now a source of regular natural disasters and swelling refugee flows. At each juncture, the Democrats have attempted restoration: to manage the crisis, carry out the bailout, stitch things back together, and try to get back to normal. It is the form of this orientation, as much as substantive questions of culture, race, and gender, that seems to me the fundamental reason the Democrats are often experienced as a force of inhibition rather than empowerment by so many voters. And it is against this politics of containment that Trump's obscenity comes to feel like a liberation for so many."

"One thing I'm sure of: Harris ignored voters' anger over Gaza, and it cost the Democrats dear: Disempower voters and they will seize back that power in the only way they can, showing you that they have a choice by rejecting the status quo. The voters who switched to Trump will get the headlines, but there will probably be many who went third party, or simply stayed at home. The Democrats broke their pact with many members of the electorate, and then were shocked that voters did not unilaterally uphold it. [...] The feeling of unperturbed exceptionalism is the same one that cannot allow them to understand the sense of vulnerability, precarity and fear that the past year has given rise to. Those astonished by Trump's win and who worry about the terrifying era that he is about to usher in will never grasp that to many, that world is already here, they've just not been living in it."

In These Times, "Democrats Chose to Back a Genocide and Turn Right Over Defeating Trump: By refusing to budge on Palestine, Harris and the Democrats surrendered their moral advantage, forcing them to track right and alienate their base. [...] But feigned concern and vibes can only go so far. As the honeymoon of 'brat summer' gave way to a codified campaign theme, it was clear not only was Gaza going to be ignored entirely as an issue — and the death machine would churn on without pause — but Team Harris would be leaning into a strategy of attempting to woo so-called 'disaffected Republicans.' She made the centerpiece of her campaign Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney, the former vice president of George W. Bush. To the Savvy Commentators this made sense — obviously, winning over fence-sitting Republicans was the right call. And few in our media questioned whether this strategy had any downsides."

OMG: "Axelrod pushes for Rahm Emanuel as DNC chair." Robert Reich is all right, I guess, but absolutely no one else from the Obama or Clinton administrations should ever again be in government, in the Democratic leadership, or communicating in public.

Just before the election, we heard from Stanley Greenberg, "The Campaign That Pushed Harris Into a Tie With Donald Trump [...] Three years ago, I titled my piece in the Prospect 'Democrats, Speak to Working-Class Discontent: It's the one way to mobilize Blacks, Hispanics and Asians, not just white workers.' Harris and Walz were doing precisely that. Major speakers at the Democratic convention took up corporate greed, the hardships from high costs, and the current battle for the middle class. They pointed out what Harris said in an economic speech on August 16: 'Donald Trump fights for billionaires and large corporations. I will fight to give money back to working- and middle-class Americans.' Base voters made the cost of living their very top concern, and she was finally telling them it was her top priority too. [...] And for reasons that I still can't understand, they dropped the middle-class message and voicing its discontent." And started campaigning with Liz Cheney instead. On October 9th Harris/Walz had all three "Blue Wall" states and Nevada, with Arizona tied and a lead of 276-251 in the Electoral College. As of October 27th, she's lost Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as well as Nevada and Arizona (with Virginia going from dark blue to light blue). There was a while back there when even Florida was only barely pink.

"A GOP operative accused a monastery of voter fraud. Nuns fought back.: Sister Stephanie Schmidt had a hunch about what her fellow nuns would discuss over dinner at their Erie, Pennsylvania, monastery on Wednesday night. The day before, a Republican operative in the battleground state falsely suggested to his nearly 58,000 followers on X that no one lived at the monastery and that mail ballots cast from there would be 'illegal votes.' Cliff Maloney, who hired 120 people to go door-to-door across Pennsylvania urging Republican voters to return their mail ballots, wrote on X that one of those workers had 'discovered' an Erie address where 53 people were registered to vote but 'NO ONE lives there.'"

Earlier in the week, Congress rejected a bill to give an administration the power to pretty much kill any non-profit organization that disagreed with it, although 52 Democrats also voted for it — every one of whom should be removed from Congress at our earliest opportunity. But now the newly-elected Congress has the votes — thanks to those same Democrats — to to pass it. The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, which would empower the secretary of the Treasury to designate any nonprofit as a 'terrorist supporting organization' and revoke its tax-exempt status, is set to go before the Committee on Rules on Monday for a hearing that could tee up the bill for a new floor vote. [...] The bill, also known as H.R. 9495, has come under withering criticism from a broad coalition of organizations that say its sponsors are pushing it as a means of cracking down on free speech — particularly speech in support of Palestine. In a joint statement earlier this week, a coalition of Arab American and Muslim organizations pledged to continue to fight the bill."

"No Thanks to These 52 Dems, House Defeats Bill Enabling Trump Assault on Nonprofits: 'Every single Democrat who voted for this is not taking the threat of Trump remotely seriously and should be disqualified from any leadership positions moving forward,' said Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman. Legislation that would have handed President-elect Donald Trump sweeping power to investigate and shutter news outlets, government watchdogs, humanitarian organizations, and other nonprofits was defeated in the House of Representatives on Tuesday after a coalition of progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers mobilized against it, warning of the bill's dire implications for the right to dissent. But 52 Democratic lawmakers—including Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), and Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.)—apparently did not share the grave concerns expressed by the ACLU and other leading rights groups, opting to vote alongside 204 Republicans in favor of the bill. One Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, joined 144 Democrats in voting no. The measure ultimately fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to approve legislation under the fast-track procedure used by the bill's supporters, but progressives wasted no time spotlighting the Democrats who supported the measure." The bill was fast-tracked last week and required a two-thirds majority to pass, but this time it will only take a plain majority and there will be no stopping it.

It's amazing how many people supported Trump thinking he is some kind of peacenik, despite his record when he was previously in office, not to mention his more recent public statements. "Trump to Nominate Marco Rubio as U.S. Secretary of State, Bridging GOP's Hawk-isolationist Divide: Florida senator has vocally defended Israel's right to respond to Iranian attack and backed Trump's promise to deport pro-Palestinian protesters in the U.S. on student visas" I wonder if they are going to be disappointed when they realize he's stacking his administration with neocons, the very people they've been objecting to. (And, also, even Republicans have been supporting a ceasefire, at least while Biden has been refusing to support one).

"Museum finds remains from a victim of a notorious 1980s Philadelphia police bombing: [...] The remains are believed to be those of 12-year-old Delisha Africa, one of five children and six adults killed when police bombed the MOVE organization's headquarters, causing a fire that spread to dozens of row homes. The violent confrontation, a rare bombing of American citizens by U.S. civilian authorities, led to lawsuits but no criminal charges against police or city officials."

RIP: "Phil Lesh, bassist for the Grateful Dead, dies at 84: The musician was a founding member of the influential band and died 'surrounded by his family and full of love'" (Rolling Stone's obit is here.) I saw them a few times, but a friend showed me this video that showcases what Phil Lesh brought.

RIP: "Candyman actor Tony Todd dies aged 69" I know he was best known for his horror roles (I saw Night of the Living Dead in a movie theater, although I don't really remember much about the movie, now, nevermind who was in it), and I know I saw him in numerous cop shows from Homicide to I don't kmow how many others, and he was even one of the members of the party in The Man From Earth, but the stand-out memory for me was his role as grown-up Jake Cisco in DS9's "The Visitor". Took my breath away. (Mind, he was pretty good as Worf's brother Kurn, too.)

I don't know anything about the author of this book or the reviewer, but I'm afraid "Finally, a fresh argument against 'wokeness'" tracks pretty well with what I've observed over the decades. Some academic types make a name for themselves, but the amelioration mostly doesn't happen out there in the trenches. Poor black people aren't suddenly doing better because of DEI - in fact, it seems to have done more harm than good. "One of the hallmarks of Awokenings, according to al-Gharbi, is that they do little or nothing for the marginalized people they are supposed to benefit. As the historical record shows, they mostly serve to create jobs, scholarships and other opportunities for symbolic capitalists. The growing ranks of diversity, equity and inclusion officers in corporations, on campuses and in other symbolic-capitalist hubs is just par for the course during an Awokening. At the same time, Awokenings create real problems for the marginalized people — on the left, on the right and in the center — who resist or even question them." I don't think the working class is really all that socially conservative, but I know they aren't neoliberals who think it's more important to say "Latinx" than to have a living wage.

Just for the record, this is Liz Cheney, pretending that Democrats want to kill babies because they didn't want to pass a law to make infantacide illegal because it already is. She has also always been a warmonger. Her father, by the way, helped steal the 2000 election, lied us into bombing the hell out of Afghanistan and invading Iraq and violated US law against torture. I can't imagine how Democrats convinced themselves that they could win an election by putting her front and center to campaign with.

"University of Michigan recruits state attorney general to crack down on Gaza protesters: Revealed: in a highly unusual move, regents allegedly bypassed local prosecutors, believing Dana Nessel would be tougher on student protesters". And then when Rashida Tlaib complained that this unusual move against protesters suggested some kind of bias was involved, Nessel accused Tlaib of saying it was because she was Jewish, a false claim that was repeated more than once by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, with plenty of amplification from ADL. Slanders of Tlaib for supposedly saying antisemitic things proliferate widely in the smear-osphere, both on the net and off it. It's an adventure asking for a citation. (And I do wish people would remember that Palestinians, most of whom are too young to be familiar with English-speaking discourse on antisemitism, may be completely unaware of "antisemitic tropes" such as that Jews are miserly and money-grubbing. This image is an example of that kind of antisemitism which, strangelty, ADL and AIPAC never had a word to say about.)

"If Trump Wins, Blame the Billionaires: Without them, this presidential race wouldn't be close at all." Well, Elon makes that clear, and then this week both The LA Times and The Washington Post declined to endorse a candidate in the presidential race. But I still find it strange that Trump's and Vance's two immediate backers, Musk and Thiel, are exactly what their campaign is based on being against: immigrants.

From The Verge, "Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode: We declined. Today's episode of Decoder, well — it's a ride. I'm talking to Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, who's built Intuit into a juggernaut business software company through a series of major acquisitions. Quicken and QuickBooks are incredibly well known as personal finance and small business accounting software, but nearly everything else — TurboTax, Mailchimp, Credit Karma, and loads more — were acquisitions of some kind along the way. That leads to a lot of challenging structure questions that Sasan and I really got into — integrating all those companies and their different approaches to software requires big decisions, and Intuit made a big decision handling it all by betting on interoperability that I found fascinating. So far, that sounds like normal Decoder stuff, right? Here's where it got weird. I couldn't have the CEO of Intuit on without asking about tax reform in the United States. Individual income taxes are more complicated in the US than in almost any other developed economy, and Intuit has been lobbying hard since the late 1990s to keep it that way to protect TurboTax, spending nearly $3.8 million in lobbying in 2023 alone. There's been extensive reporting about it." And then he got a demand from Intuit to delete that whole section of the interview.

"Big Supermarkets Kill Your Favorite Products [...] One of the arguments Amazon makes to justify selling its own private label products ahead of the products sold on its platform by third parties is that supermarkets often do this as well. What Bezos and co. leave out, of course, is that the ability to self-preference your own private label product, for supermarkets as well as Amazon, is probably a result of scale and some level of monopoly power." (Further reading: "The Grocery Cartels")

"'The Police Had Their Eye on Me': How Law-abiding Israelis Calling for the Hostages' Release End Up in Jail: Over 800 people have been detained at protests calling for the release of the hostages since the October 7 attack, with some spending hours or days in detention. Five of the arrestees detail their treatment at the hands of the police, and whether it has deterred them from attending further demonstrations."

"Shaming Israelis for Fleeing Their Country Ignores the Reasons Behind Their Departure: A large number of those leaving Israel are doing so out of a realization that the ethos they grew up on is giving way to one based on Jewish supremacy and ruinous policies"

Forbes, "Money Growth Does Not Cause Inflation! [...] The bottom line is that the 'money growth==>inflation' view makes perfect sense in some alternate universe where all those assumptions regarding the variables DO hold, but not here, not today, not in the United States of America in 2011. That's not how it works. It's a damn shame, I know, because it's so simple and intuitively appealing and it would make controlling inflation really simple. But, if we are to develop useful policies then we need a model better suited to the way the modern financial system works."

"Rapid Money Supply Growth Does Not Cause Inflation: Neither do rapid growth in government debt, declining interest rates, or rapid Increases in a central bank's balance sheet. Monetarist theory, which came to dominate economic thinking in the 1980s and the decades that followed, holds that rapid money supply growth is the cause of inflation. The theory, however, fails an actual test of the available evidence. In our review of 47 countries, generally from 1960 forward, we found that more often than not high inflation does not follow rapid money supply growth, and in contrast to this, high inflation has occurred frequently when it has not been preceded by rapid money supply growth."

"October 7: Forensic analysis shows Hamas abuses, many false Israeli claims: Investigation draws up a list of those killed in Hamas attack, but also finds certain claims repeated by Israeli politicians untrue." One-hour film from Al-Jazeera.

"A Cartography of Genocide: Israel's Conduct in Gaza Since October 2023"

"The thing about the Kobayashi Maru"

Pocketful of Miracles is one of my favorite movies of all time and it helped me feel a little better the other week watching it for free on YouTube. Glenn Ford, Bette Davis, and Hope Lange are great in it, but for me, Peter Falk and Edward Everett Horton are the real delights. Do yourself a favor and take a little time out to watch it, it sure can't hurt.

Scarlet billows start to spread

Thanks to the late Taral Wayne for once having used this APOD photo by David Lane of the Milky Way over Devil's Tower as his October profile pic. (Original APOD page here.)

Scott Hechinger in Teen Vogue, "Robert Roberson Will Be Executed Because It's Legal to Execute Innocent People in the US: For one week in September 2024, it seemed like everyone knew the name Marcellus Williams. Williams, a Black man who firmly maintained his innocence, was about to be executed by the state of Missouri for a murder that countless legal experts say there's no evidence he committed. [...] But then horror and shock spread as the United States Supreme Court and Parson declined to intervene and news of yet another state killing emerged. How could this happen? How could Missouri kill a man when all signs pointed to his innocence?"

Marcy Wheeler on "John Roberts' Sordid Legacy: 14 Pages of Mean Tweets: John Roberts not only rewrote the Constitution to protect Donald Trump. He forced prosecutors to spend 14 pages arguing that it is not among the job duties of the President of the United States to attack Republicans who've crossed him on Twitter. This is what the Chief Justice wants to protect. This is the all-powerful President John Roberts wants to have. Someone who can sit in his dining room siccing mobs on fellow Republicans. Who knows whether it will work? Who knows whether these right wing Justices will go that far — to argue that even the President's mean Tweets targeting members of his own party must be protected from any accountability?"

Israel came up with a novel reason for attacking a hospital in Lebanon when it claimed there is a bunker with a pot of gold underneath it, presumably hidden there by the Leprechaun peacekeeping squad from Ireland. "Israel has accused Hezbollah of keeping hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold in a bunker under a hospital in the southern suburbs of Beirut, though it said it would not strike the complex. The Sahel hospital in Dahiyeh was evacuated shortly afterwards, and Fadi Alame, its director, told Reuters that the allegations were untrue. Israel did not provide evidence for its claim that cash was being kept under the hospital. Instead, it published an animated graphic that purported to show a bunker under the hospital and said it had previously been used to hide the former secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Israel appealed to the Lebanese government to confiscate the money it said the Shia militant organisation had stolen from the Lebanese people. Shortly after, Israel issued a series of warnings to residents of Dahiyeh that it would begin striking buildings in the area and that they should move at least 500 metres away. Those who remained in the area began to flee." So, they showed a cartoon, so it must be true, and of course everyone knows it's necessary to Israel's self-defense to root out any theft of monies from "the Lebanese people" by Hezbolla. The hitch in this lie is that, unlike in Gaza, the press is allowed in to check things out, and the BBC didn't see any tunnels, bunker, or gold there.

One of the more frustrating contributions to the discourse is when Israel's defenders dismiss any counter as coming from "Hamas propaganda". Although we occassionally see quotes dropped into newspaper articles that purport to be from some kind of official Hamas statement, almost everything else is coming from Israelis — including statements of intent by Israeli leaders and Tik-Tok and Instagram posts by IDF soldiers. Drop Site has published a lengthy investigation of one battalion's mission of destruction, and their social media posts, "'Our Job Is to Flatten Gaza. No One Will Stop Us.' [...] The footage Drop Site News has documented in this investigation comes from just one battalion and yet the level of destruction remains absolutely staggering. It seems as if the battalion is in a desperate race against time, flattening as much as possible with disturbing intensity even as it becomes a daily routine. None of this is actual combat. It's pure devastation aimed at civilians, aided and abetted by the staggering level of impunity given to them by their western benefactors in the Biden White House. Nowhere in these videos is there any mention of Hamas. Instead, soldiers make mocking comments, calling it 'Urban Renewal,' while others joke about 'pre-registration for lands within walking distance of the sea.'"

Gee, it sounds like the whole State Department and Pentagon were trying to warn Blinken and McGurk not to do what they were doing: "The emails, which haven't been reported before, reveal alarm early on in the State Department and Pentagon that a rising death toll in Gaza could violate international law and jeopardize U.S. ties in the Arab world." And it's funny how often people talk like we have no ties in the Arab world, as if Israel is our only friend. (And the claim that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East is a bit strange, too, when Iran is a democracy, and Israel doesn't allow most of the people who live under its control to be called citizens and to vote for its government.) But it's clear now that whatever they may have said in public, Biden's people really wanted a wider war. And what are we to make of this? "Blinken Approved Policy to Bomb Aid Trucks, Israeli Cabinet Members Suggest." There was a time when I would have been very surprised to see this in TNR: "Joe Biden Chose This Catastrophic Path Every Step of the Way."

You can watch Al-Jazeera's "Inside Western media's reporting on Gaza | The Listening Post," about the blatant, enforced bias of the establishment media's coverage of the genocide, free on YouTube.

Doctorow, "Return to office and dying on the job: Denise Prudhomme's bosses at Wells Fargo insisted that the in-person camaraderie of their offices warranted a mandatory return-to-office policy, but when she died at her desk in her Tempe, AZ office, no one noticed for four days. That was in August. Now, Wells Fargo United has published a statement on her death, one that vibrates with anger at the callously selective surveillance that Wells Fargo inflicts on its workforce "— This one particularly angered me. We've known since at least 2008 that Wells Fargo's business model is one big crime spree and I want to know why these people still aren't in prison.

Kuttner in the Prospect, "An Epic Dystopia: How a near-monopoly gained control of most of the nation's electronic medical records, to the detriment of medical practice and doctor morale: I periodically see three wonderful doctors, my internist and two specialists. They all know that I'm a journalist who once wrote for The New England Journal of Medicine. Every time I see them, even before they examine me, each one spends several minutes railing about something called Epic. That sort of thing tends to pique a journalist's curiosity." They're supposed to be a just-plain medical database, but the priority is finding ways to jack up prices. Cory Doctorow has more on the evils of Epic's upcoding.

The American Prospect is devoting the current issue to "The Cold Civil War: States have always diverged on policies, but it's grown more intense. And for red states, that's not enough. [...] In 1967 in a speech at Stanford University, Martin Luther King described 'two Americas': One with all the 'material necessities for their bodies' and the other 'perishing on a lonely island of poverty.' Nearly 60 years later, King perfectly captures the two Americas that we're dealing with right now, bounded by a geographical reality: The laws that you live under are determined by the policymakers in the state where you live." And red state laws are much less generous than blue state laws, which means a lot more people are being hurt there - and having shorter life expectancy. "This wide gulf between healthy and ailing America is bad enough. But red states in particular want their policy preferences to be reflected across the nation, and have engaged in numerous aggressive tactics to make that a reality." Kalena Thomhave's article, "The Chasm Between Oklahoma and Connecticut," takes a look at how that happens: "The two states weren't always such polar opposites. For instance, in 1959, Oklahoma and Connecticut residents had roughly the same life expectancy. But fast-forward 60 years, and the numbers have significantly diverged. Connecticut now ranks among the top ten states in average lifespan, with an average life expectancy at birth of 80.8 years in 2019. That same year in Oklahoma, the average lifespan at birth was more than four years lower at 76.1 years, among the bottom ten states in life expectancy. The national average life expectancy in 2019 was roughly 79 years."

RIP: "Kris Kristofferson, US country singer and actor, dies aged 88 — He came from a military family and for a long time he did them proud, but when he quit to pursue songwriting, they disowned him. A Rhodes Scholar who started off supporting the Vietnam war, he ultimately repudiated that view as he heard more from the VVAW. Nice photogallery here.

RIP: Taral Wayne (1951-2024)— This happened in July and was an enormous shock, even though I knew he wasn't well. Taral was a huge part of my fandom for so many years and never stopped mattering. Just before I moved to England, Taral created a giant card with a fake Bergeron cover that everyone at the 1985 Disclave signed, and it's had pride of place on my sitting room mantel ever since. He was quirky and grumpy and a lot of other things, but he was always fair, and generous with his art, and I'm so sorry that he's gone.

RIP: "Controversial all-time MLB hits leader Pete Rose dies at 83: Pete Rose, baseball's career hits leader and fallen idol who undermined his historic achievements and Hall of Fame dreams by gambling on the game he loved and once embodied, has died. He was 83." One thing Trump said that was absolutely true is that Pete Rose belonged in the Hall of Fame. I swear I saw him take flight during what he called "The World Serious". He was amazing.

I completely missed the fact last year that The Washington Post had completed its purge of quality by firing Radley Balko, one of the only reasons to read the decreasingly relevant rag, and he started his own Substack as a result. He's got a good piece up right now detailing just what an impossible, frightening, terrible idea Trump's deportation plan really is.

Dave Johnson on The Era Of The Oligarchs: Let me tell you about the billionaires. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy whatever they want, and it does something to them. [...] Imagine the disappointment of becoming a billionaire (or even only achieving $8 or 900,000,000) and NOTHING HAPPENS. (We've seen how the tech bros think they should be immortal and then use their money to try to get there.) They really thought there'd be something more. Some award, some elevation. One thing is for sure, though. They are better than regular people and they know it. It's the entire point of society! They've reached the top. They're smarter. They deserve what they have. And more than anything they deserve more. Elevation. They deserve elevation."

I had assumed most people would have seen this about the Lancet report but since it seems a lot haven't: "Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential: By June 19, 2024, 37,396 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip since the attack by Hamas and the Israeli invasion in October, 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.1 The Ministry's figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services,2 the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry,3 which found claims of data fabrication implausible. Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza Health Ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure.5 The Ministry has had to augment its usual reporting, based on people dying in its hospitals or brought in dead, with information from reliable media sources and first responders. This change has inevitably degraded the detailed data recorded previously. Consequently, the Gaza Health Ministry now reports separately the number of unidentified bodies among the total death toll. As of May 10, 2024, 30% of the 35,091 deaths were unidentified. Some officials and news agencies have used this development, designed to improve data quality, to undermine the veracity of the data. However, the number of reported deaths is likely an underestimate. The non-governmental organisation Airwars undertakes detailed assessments of incidents in the Gaza Strip and often finds that not all names of identifiable victims are included in the Ministry's list.6 Furthermore, the UN estimates that, by Feb 29, 2024, 35% of buildings in the Gaza Strip had been destroyed,5 so the number of bodies still buried in the rubble is likely substantial, with estimates of more than 10,000. [...] In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28,000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58,260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85,750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024."

I'd also assumed everyone saw this. There seem to be a number of people who only ever see the hasbara but don't see any contradictory facts: "Israel: Palestinian Healthcare Workers Tortured: ICC Prosecutor Should Investigate Attacks on Health Care, Detainee Abuses. (Jerusalem) – Israeli forces have arbitrarily detained Palestinian healthcare workers in Gaza since hostilities began in October 2023, deported them to detention facilities in Israel, and allegedly tortured and ill-treated them, Human Rights Watch said today. The detention of healthcare workers in the context of the Israeli military's repeated attacks on hospitals in Gaza has contributed to the catastrophic degradation of the besieged territory's healthcare system. Released doctors, nurses and paramedics described to Human Rights Watch their mistreatment in Israeli custody, including humiliation, beatings, forced stress positions, prolonged cuffing and blindfolding, and denial of medical care. They also reported torture, including rape and sexual abuse by Israeli forces, denial of medical care, and poor detention conditions for the general detainee population."

"Fact check: Debunking Trump's October lying spree about immigration" has some good verbal karate on the issue, but is most notable for seeing someone in the establishment media who is actually good at doing it.

"Harris and the Enthusiasm Gap: Can she restore anything like the excitement of the campaign's early days when Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic candidate? Can she win without it?" Kuttner says Harris has made unforced errors that are hurting her campaign. He's right, and she's now down on the electoral vote map. I don't think the parade of Cheneys and Mark Cuban have helped her, and I still think she needed to show some kind of break with Biden's foreign policy. Snubbing a Palestinian speaker at the convention was more than a little troubling, and continuing to double down on unconditional support for Israel can't be good. But those ties to Wall Street trouble a lot of people, and I also frankly wish that Clinton and Obama would just keep quiet, they are doing more harm than good.

Does anyone remember this? From July 2020: "Federal Officers Use Unmarked Vehicles To Grab People In Portland, DHS Confirms"

"Why typewriters are having a renaissance in the digital age" (video and transcript)

"30 Times Architects And Engineers Created Weird Building Designs"

"Bill Hicks Final Unaired Letterman Performance 1993"

A much younger Jon Stewart interviews George Carlin.

I'd always wondered what she was doing in the (Bobby Darren version of) this song, but I didn't know until now that Louis Armstrong had put it into the original when he sang it with her and Darren kept it. Louis Armstrong & Lotte Lenya - "Mack the Knife"

May seem peculiar

"Londons Dream von Leonid Afremov" from Arnaud Caron is in the London Eclectic capital collection.

The summer seems to have slipped away from me. I'm not sure exactly what happened but I think it started with a fall. Nothing broke but it hurt to type for a bit, and then I got that lovely whooping cough that's been going around. After a couple weeks of no sleep it finally occurred to me to consult the chemist, who sent a bottle of Robitussin so I could finally get some rest. Except I was still sleepy all the time, even when the cough was long gone, very much like my most notable symptom the first time I had Covid. I didn't have the presence of mind to get a test, but Mr. Sideshow didn't seem to think he was sick once his own case of whooping cough subsided. (I wish I had looked it up a long time ago, but, for the record: That DPT shot they gave me when I was a kid inoculated me from whooping cough but ran out after a decade or two, and I was pretty sure that cough I had in, I think, the '90s, was maybe whooping cough, and I didn't know that it's also self-inoculating for a while. If I'd realized I should get another shot, I definitely would have. It was torture. Get the shot if you can afford it.) There were some technical difficulties as well, but....

But what a wild ride I missed! So much happened that I'm not sure I could have kept up with it anyway. Biden was tanking in the polls and Pelosi stepped in to get him to drop out of the race. That had to be hard since he didn't think Harris could win. Of course, he'd mainly picked her as assassination/impeachment insurance and he knew she wasn't popular, but somehow she seems to have galvanized the party into new levels of energy, despite showing no signs of changing Biden's bad policies or even continuing his good ones. But in choosing her own running mate, she resisted the urge to hippie-punch and chose a popular candidate instead of a hippie-punching school voucher advocate, to most people's relief. For a while she seemed to be getting the blue wall states back, but her continued refusal to signal any variance with Biden's Middle-East policy seems to have made them precarious. Jill Stein now polls higher with Muslim-Americans than Harris does. She still appears to be beating Trump in the EC, but the Dems seem set to lose the Senate in the meantime. And that Electoral Vote map changes a little too often for my tastes.

But the horroshow in Gaza made watching the news feel like a pointless task. Israel has proven it can do anything it wants, and it's all-in on genocide. And on starting wider regional wars, especially with it's latest terrorist attacks on Lebanon. The US is being led straight into the maw of Armageddon.

"The fast-food industry claims the California minimum wage law is costing jobs. Its numbers are fake [...] Here's something you might want to know about this claim. It's baloney, sliced thick. In fact, from September through January, the period covered by the ad, fast-food employment in California has gone up, as tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. The claim that it has fallen represents a flagrant misrepresentation of government employment figures. Something else the ad doesn't tell you is that after January, fast-food employment continued to rise. As of April, employment in the limited-service restaurant sector that includes fast-food establishments was higher by nearly 7,000 jobs than it was in April 2023, months before Newsom signed the minimum wage bill. Despite that, the job-loss figure and finger-pointing at the minimum wage law have rocketed around the business press and conservative media, from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Post to the website of the conservative Hoover Institution."

"Elon Musk's Lawyers Quietly Subpoena Public Interest Groups: The billionaire's legal war over lost X advertisers takes a 'really cynical' turn. Lawyers representing Elon Musk and X, previously known as Twitter, have quietly begun sending subpoenas to a host of public interest groups, Mother Jones has learned. Most of the targeted organizations have signed open letters to X's advertisers expressing concerns about the platform's direction under Musk's leadership. The groups include the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the digital rights organization Access Now, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). The subpoenas represent a new chapter in the legal war Musk launched after advertisers fled X, and are part of a lawsuit Musk and X first filed about a year ago against Media Matters over a report it published documenting that ads appeared alongside extremist content. The subpoenas demand any correspondence the organizations have had with that progressive media watchdog group. Several targets told Mother Jones they've had no or limited interaction with Media Matters, and that the subpoenas feel, in the words of more than one person, like 'a fishing expedition.'"

Recent hasbara has included the claim that more frequent reporting of Palestinian deaths than Israeli deaths is evidence of bias rather than the simple result of there being more Palestinian deaths than Israeli deaths. But even the more "liberal" news media is still biasing their news toward Israel, even in Britain. "We Ran the Numbers – Here's How Britain's Progressive Newspapers Have Covered Gaza: Palestinians are 'killed', Israelis 'massacred'. [...] Our analysis reveals that in a war that has seen Israel kill over 39,000 Palestinians, all three publications favoured Israeli lives, narratives and voices, albeit to varying degrees. Across the four tests, the Mirror and Independent were consistently biased against Palestinians. The Guardian's headlines were much more nuanced and balanced but still gave disproportionate coverage to Israelis."

"US Working Class 'Overwhelmingly to the Left' of the Rich on Economic Policy: Survey: The new research, said one union leader, provides Democrats with a "clear roadmap to winning back" working-class voters. Polling results released Monday show that working-class voters in the United States are broadly more supportive of major progressive agenda items than those in the middle and upper classes, offering Democratic political candidates what one union leader called a 'clear roadmap to winning back voters we've lost to a GOP that's growing more extreme by the day.' The survey of over 5,000 registered U.S. voters was conducted last August by HIT Strategies and Working Families Power (WFP), a sibling organization of the Working Families Party. The poll found that a majority of working-class voters either somewhat or totally support a national jobs guarantee (69%), a 'public healthcare program like Medicare for All' (64%), a crackdown on rent-gouging landlords (74%), and tuition-free public colleges and universities (63%), landing them 'overwhelmingly to the left' of higher-income segments of the population." The poll did not support the idea that the working-class was more socially conservative.

This is Jeet Heer's praise for The Lever's "Master Plan" series, and you can listen to existing episodes of "Master Plan" here. There's a bonus episode of Ralph Nader talking about how their fight for cleaner water and air incensed Lewis F. Powell, here. Yes, there really was a genuine conspiracy to corrupt the United States, and it didn't come from Russia.

Courts have ruled consistently that the cash bail practices of L.A., San Francisco, and Sacramento are unconstitutional. But California judges are ignoring those rulings: "The court cases all said something simple: it's unconstitutional to jail people away from their families after arrest solely because their families cannot access a cash payment for money bail. (Only U.S. and Philippines have for-profit bail industry.) So, what happened? The judges in the other 55 of California's 58 counties have simply refused to comply with these rulings. I've never seen anything like it in my career. In those 55 counties, the court have recently decided to simply keep doing what has been held unconstitutional. They have kept their cash bail schedules--essentially menus that assign certain amounts of cash based on what a person is charged with any nothing else."

RIP: "Phil Donahue, Pioneering Talk Show Host, Dies at 88 [...] Never a stranger to controversy or hotly debated sociopolitical issues, the silver-haired Donahue brought a strong journalistic spine to his popular show and was a potent contrast to the regular celebrity chatter and soap opera menu of daytime television." He got fired for opposing the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq even though he had the most popular show on the network. Jeff Cohen's short appreciation of him is actually a better fit. (Also: Jon Schwarz on how "NYT Can't Forgive Donahue for Being Right on Iraq.")

RIP: "Organize, Teach, Fight: Jane McAlevey, 1964-2024 [...] Jane—organizer, writer, and teacher—will live on in the tens of thousands of organizers around the world committed to deep organizing methods. But like so many other people in what Jane affectionately called her 'tribe,' I'm gutted that she's gone. She had so much more to give the movement. And she would have loved to see the day when workers won on the scale she knew they were capable of." She died after multiple fights with cancer, but more importantly, decades of teaching people how to fight. She says a lot of important things in this Katie Halper segment.

RIP: "Blues Legend John Mayall Dead at 90." We all listened to this guy and the various editions of The Bluesbreakers.

RIP: "Writer Lewis H. Lapham, longtime editor of Harper's Magazine and the founder of Lapham's Quarterly, died in Rome. He was 89." He got a deal to write for them, and ended up running the show.

RIP: "James Darren, Teen Idol Actor in Gidget, Singer and Director, Dies at 88" — I'm just old enough to remember him as Moondoggie, and I liked him in Time Tunnel, but Vic Fontaine has to be one of my favorite characters of all time.

RIP: "James Earl Jones Dies: Revered Field Of Dreams Star, Darth Vader Voice, Broadway Regular, Was 93" — I loved him in a lot of things, but especially his iconic moment as a union man. He was pretty cool waiting for his airplane to ram that other plane, too.

"Dalek Spy: FBI Once Investigated Dallas Man for Selling Secrets to a Fictional Alien Race"

There is no way for me to make butter pecan ice cream but I want some. I wonder if I can find an able-bodied volunteer....

John Mayall, "Room to Move"

Sleeping on the job

Semini Kwsta's "Il Nostro Inconto" is from the South American Painters collection.

I don't know how much more of this I can face. The only solution I can see is launching all the billionaires into the sun.

Assange out of prison, but not without extracting a plea deal for the phony charges. This story isn't over and we'll have to wait to see where it goes, but for the moment Julian Assange is out of Britain and headed home to Australia and his family.

Tom Tomorrow presents the Trump Felony Conviction Talking Points from the GOP.

"Revealed: Israeli spy chief 'threatened' ICC prosecutor over war crimes inquiry: Mossad director Yossi Cohen personally involved in secret plot to pressure Fatou Bensouda to drop Palestine investigation, sources say [...] Cohen, who was one of Netanyahu's closest allies at the time and is emerging as a political force in his own right in Israel, personally led the Mossad's involvement in an almost decade-long campaign by the country to undermine the court. [...] According to accounts shared with ICC officials, he is alleged to have told her: 'You should help us and let us take care of you. You don't want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.'"

"3 weeks before Oct. 7, IDF Gaza Division warned of Hamas plan to attack, take 250 hostages: Report reveals Sept. 19 document that specified terror group was training for mass assault on south; 'I feel like crying, yelling, swearing,' says soldier involved with memo"

Harold Meyerson, "Who Created the Israel-Palestine Conflict? It wasn't really Jews or Palestinians. It was the U.S. Congress, which closed American borders 100 years ago this month. Without either side even noticing it, we're coming up on the centenary of the most decisive event in the fraught history of the Israel-Palestine relationship. It was not the 1896 publication of Theodor Herzl's Zionist manifesto, nor the 1917 Balfour Declaration in which the United Kingdom pledged its support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was not the 1948 founding of the Israeli state and subsequent Nakba—the expulsion of many thousands of Palestinians from Israel. Nor was it Israel's occupation, following the 1967 war, of what had been Palestinian territories, or either of the two intifadas. Rather, it was the enactment on May 26, 1924, of the Johnson-Reed Act by the Congress of the United States. Fueled chiefly by white Protestant xenophobic fear and rage at Jews and Catholics flowing into the United States since the 1880s, the act effectively outlawed immigration from Russia, Poland, Italy, and all of Eastern and Southern Europe. Had that pre-Trumpian wall not gone up on America's borders, there's no reason to think there ever would have been more than a trickle of Jews moving to Palestine.

"The Music Mafia's Invincible 'Poison Dwarf,' in the Crosshairs at Last? The DOJ says Live Nation has been colluding with its former chairman Irving Azoff to fix artist fees and 'pimp' Ticketmaster."

RIP: "Donald Sutherland Dies: Revered Actor In Klute, Ordinary People, MASH, Hunger Games & Scores Of Others Was 88." I can't remember when I first saw him, but I know I loved him when he got involved with FTA. There's a nice gallery of pictures here.

RIP: "Willie Mays, the Giants' electrifying 'Say Hey Kid,' dies at 93 [...] The center fielder, who began his professional career in the Negro Leagues in 1948, had been baseball's oldest living Hall of Famer. He was voted into the Hall in 1979, his first year of eligibility, and in 1999 followed only Babe Ruth on The Sporting News' list of the game's top stars. The Giants retired his uniform number, 24, and set their AT&T Park in San Francisco on Willie Mays Plaza."

RIP: "Kinky Friedman, Proudly Eccentric Texas Singer-Songwriter, Dead at 79: Known for songs like "Sold American," the cigar-chomping character and buddy of Willie Nelson won acclaim as a journalist and novelist and once ran for Texas governor"

RIP: "Martin Mull, Arrested Development and Roseanne actor, dies aged 80: Martin Mull, whose droll, esoteric comedy and acting made him a hip sensation in the 1970s and later a beloved guest star on sitcoms including Roseanne and Arrested Development, has died, his daughter said on Friday. He was 80 years old." I saw his furniture at The Cellar Door, and learned this song from him.

"King Alito's Arrogance Has Reached Frightening New Levels [...] But there is a substantive problem that we're starting to pick up on, and that is Justice Alito, in recent weeks, making very real and serious errors in his opinions. They're actually prompting corrections from sources that he cites, who say, 'No, my work reflects the opposite of what you're claiming.' [...] As all three liberals said in their dissents, that is not what the Supreme Court is supposed to do. Yet it's very similar to what happened in the racial gerrymandering case, where Alito looked at what the district court had found after a lengthy trial and hearing and rejected it point-by-point, saying I know better than you. This is King Alito declaring that he alone may speak the truth. What's really alarming is that the other conservatives are going along with it. They just accept that King Alito can decree these new realities and facts and histories."

I can't read the article discussed here, but maybe you can. I can't read it because I'm in England, where it's blocked. "The British justice system and British censorship: Rachel Aviv has published a brilliant investigation of the conviction of the nurse Lucy Letby on seven charges of murder. It ranks with David Grann's article about the execution of Cameron Todd WIllingham as a withering indictment of a government's criminal procedure. Both articles will lead you dismayed about how little real evidence may be needed to take someone's liberty or life." I gather there are serious questions about this conviction. The British press was free to vilify the accused, but now we can't read about those who may have put her in the frame. As Scott says, "There may be certain limited circumstances in which restrictions on reporting during an ongoing trial might be justifiable, even if they generally wouldn't be under the American system. But I can't see a good defense for an order that sweeping, which insulates the state from criticism during an appeals process. The criminal justice system is a locus of state power that needs the scrutiny of the press like any other. And it also has the effect of removing desperately needed scrutiny from the press itself"

Jacobin interviews Lily Geismer about her new book: "The Democrats Didn't Just Fail to Defend Social Programs. They Actively Undermined Them. In the '80s and '90s, the Democrats took a jackhammer to education, housing, and social welfare. This isn't the story of a weak party unable to defend its earlier gains, but a transformed party demolishing them in service of a new neoliberal ideology."

Matt Taibbi called my attention to the fact that the bank heist was so egregious that even Saturday Night Live noticed it and had a cold open of "Timothy Geithner" explaining.

"Scientists Find Crows Are Capable of Recursion — A Cognitive Ability Thought to Be Unique to Humans and Other Primates."

Melbourne Ska Orchestra - Get Smart theme