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Month: January 2023

Good news

Will anyone hear about it?

We’re obsessing today on the Joe Biden documents case hour after hour so I doubt many of you have heard about this. Dean Baker reports:

The December Consumer Price Index (CPI), following a great December jobs report, shows the economy has turned the corner and seems on a path to stable growth with moderate inflation. The CPI showed prices actually fell by 0.1 percent for the month. This brought the annualized rate of inflation over the last three months in the overall index to just 1.8 percent.

With the drop in prices reported in December, the real average hourly wage for all workers is now 0.3 percent above its pre-pandemic level. For production and non-supervisory workers it is 0.8 percent higher. And, for production and non-supervisory workers in the low-paying hotel and restaurant sector it is up 5.7 percent.

The overall index for December was held down by a 4.5 percent plunge in energy prices, but the 0.3 percent rise in the core index should not be terribly troubling. The biggest factor pushing the core index higher was a 0.8 percent rise in both the rent proper index and the owners equivalent rent index, which together comprise almost 40 percent of the core index. The core index, excluding shelter, fell by 0.1 percent in December.  

We know the rent indexes will be showing much lower inflation in 2023, and possibly even deflation, based on private indexes of rents in marketed units. Research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that these private indexes lead the CPI rent indexes by six months to a year. With inflation in these indexes having turned downward in the summer, we know that in the not distant future, the inflation rate shown in the CPI rent indexes will fall sharply.

After leading the surge in inflation in 2021 and the first half of this year, due to supply chain problems, most goods are now seeing flat or falling prices. New vehicle prices fell 0.1 percent, the first drop since January of 2021. With demand for vehicles slowing, and most production largely back to normal, we should be seeing more drops in vehicle prices going forward.

Used vehicle prices fell by 2.5 percent in December, continuing a decline that began in July, but with prices still almost 40 percent higher than their pre-pandemic level, they have much further to fall. Prices of other items driven up by supply chain issues, like apparel, furniture, and appliances, were mixed in December, but there is little doubt that the direction in 2023 will be flat or downward.

With goods inflation clearly under control, the Fed has said that it wanted to focus on non-rent services. Here also the picture was largely positive in December. The index for medical services rose just 0.1 percent, although it was held down by an anomalous 3.4 percent decline in the health insurance index. But even pulling this out the picture is mixed at worst. The index for professional medical services rose just 0.1 percent, putting the year over year increase at 3.0 percent. The index for hospital services rose a more concerning 1.5 percent, but that followed declines in the prior two months. It is up 4.6 percent year over year.

The picture in other services is mixed. Recreation services rose 0.3 percent, well below the rates in recent months. The index is up 5.7 percent over the year. College tuition rose 0.3 percent in December, putting the year over year increase at 2.3 percent. Transportation services rose 0.2 percent, but the year over year increase is a still a double-digit 14.6 percent.

A big factor in the year over year rise is a 28.5 percent jump in air fares, which was reversing the decline earlier in the pandemic. Air fares actually fell by 3.1 percent in December.

But there also have been sharp increases in other components of transportation services. Car repairs rose 1.0 percent in December and are up 13.0 percent year over year. The auto insurance index rose 0.6 percent in the month and 14.2 percent over the last year.

These sharp increases show how the supply chain goods problems are intertwined with the service indexes. The index for motor vehicle parts and equipment rose 9.9 percent over the last year. These increases get passed on the price of the services. With the supply chain problems now largely under control, these price pressures will lessen in the months ahead, but some of the price increase in these services is reflecting price hikes in inputs from earlier in the year. As the prices of these inputs level off, or even fall, we should see slower inflation in these services.

This is similar to the story with restaurant prices. These rose 0.4 percent in December and are up 8.3 percent over the last year. Some of this rise is due to the reduction in government subsidies for school lunches, the price of which rose 305.2 percent over the last year. But inflation in the larger category was driven to a substantial extent by an 11.8 percent rise in the price of store-bought food.

We actually got some very good news in that category in December, as grocery prices rose just 0.2 percent, the smallest increase since March of 2021. Chicken prices actually fell by 0.6 percent in the month and milk prices dropped by 1.0 percent, although the indexes for both are still up by double digit amounts year over year.

It is likely that we will see more good news on food prices going forward. The price of many commodities, like wheat, corn, and coffee, have fallen sharply from pandemic peaks. With shipping costs also having reversed the vast majority of their pandemic increases, we should be seeing lower prices for many food items in stores.

We always need caution when looking at a single month’s report, but the good December CPI report follows several months in which inflation has slowed sharply from the pace earlier in the year. All the evidence suggests that the economy is still growing at solid pace. (The latest projection for the fourth quarter from the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow is 4.1 percent.)     

It looks like the Fed has largely accomplished its mission of taming inflation, without bringing on a recession. Plenty of things can mess up this picture, like another surge of Covid or an escalation of the war in Ukraine, but for now, the economy is looking very good.

It takes a while for people to absorb these kinds of changes. My observation is that it can actually take a couple of years before people stop talking about inflation or unemployment or whatever economic calamity has already passed as an urgent problem. It become sort of a habit. And unless the media talks about it it’s likely they will take even longer.

Tote that barge. Lift that bail.

There are no classes in our society, conservatives argue

December 02, 2020

Eric Levitz writes at Intelligencer: “Progressives have long held that the right’s economic theories are just elaborate rationalizations for funneling money to the elite.”

John Kenneth Galbraith put it more elegantly: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

Ed Kilgore remarks on House Republicans renaming the House Committee on Education and Labor the House Committee on Education & the Workforce. The change, Kilgore writes:

reflects a tradition of Republican labor hostility that has grown more remarkable as the GOP has come to think of itself as the party of working people with white non-college-educated folk at the core of its electoral coalition. The GOP’s self-identification with the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil is central to its claim that the Democratic Party is now a vassal of woke coastal elitists with Ph.D.’s, whose ground troops are Big Government leeches and the immigrants who want to join them at the welfare trough.

Can’t have the plebs competing for trough space alongside the moneyed elite now, can we?

The committee’s new website attended by chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) helpfully explains why Labor has been retired:

“Labor” is an antiquated term that excludes individuals who contribute to the American workforce but aren’t classified as conventional employees. “Labor” also carries a negative connotation that ignores the dignity of work; the term is something out of a Marxist textbook that fails to capture the accomplishments of the full spectrum of the American workforce.

Which is another way of insisting that there are no differences of interest between “minimum-wage employees, billionaires, or smaller employers who believe they must keep wages, benefits, and working conditions for their own hirelings as meager as possible.” What, us classes?

The committee’s disquisition on Labor continues (caveat: swallow coffee before reading):

The Left prefers the term labor because it creates a sense of enmity between employees and employers which union bosses and left-wing activists seek to stoke for political gain. This word also fails to capture how deeply intertwined workers and job creators are in their contributions to our economy. Though the Left likes to treat employers like predators, we know that most job creators have their employees’ best interests in mind.

Kilgore concludes:

Indeed, their hostility to the very word labor represents the sort of truth in packaging that the GOP, with its Orwellian language of racism-as-anti-racism and Christian-conformity-as-liberty, usually eschews.

Getting back to Levitz, he’s commenting on the blowback from business over a proposed FTC rule that would ban noncompete clauses in employment contracts. The ones by which employers enforce employees’ “earnest cooperation” in the employees’ best interests:

Noncompete clauses are antithetical to many of the conservative movement’s purported values. The right has traditionally celebrated the virtues of open and competitive labor markets. “One important economic dimension of individual liberty is the right to sell one’s labor services without attenuation,” the economist Richard Vedder argued for the Cato Institute in 2010.

Conservatives have specifically argued that, as long as that right is protected, workers don’t need heavy-handed government policies to secure fair wages: If laborers accrue coveted skills and experience, then a competitive market will give them the necessary leverage to earn a wage commensurate with their productivity. Meanwhile, Republicans have long insisted that the rigors of free-market competition are uniquely conducive to innovation, which increases our society’s collective prosperity.

Could their arguments be mere justifications? Levitz continues:

If one assumes that the conservative movement is earnestly committed to safeguarding workers’ economic liberty, promoting competitive labor markets, and encouraging innovation, then you’d expect it to oppose noncompete agreements and, thus, support the FTC’s proposed ban.

On the other hand, if one stipulates that the right’s avowed love of free markets is purely instrumental and that its real economic commitment is to capitalist class domination, then you’d expect it to support noncompetes and oppose the FTC’s rule.

Many conservatives have taken the latter position.

That they’ve continued to maintain that argument over the last four decades in which worker productivity rose 61.8% while worker pay rose only 17.5% (after adjusting for inflation) supports progressives’ thesis about “elaborate rationalizations.” A London School of Economics paper in 2020 found that 50 years of tax cuts for the rich that would allegedly trickle down to workers “have only helped one group — the rich.”

That’s a more delicate way of saying conservatives are high on their own supply.

A 2020 paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation found:

that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans had inequality held constant—$50 trillion that would have built a far larger and more prosperous economy—$50 trillion that would have enabled the vast majority of Americans to enter this pandemic far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure.

“The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%” read the Time headline.

Why every person not among the moneyed elite is not doing a spit-take every time conservatives argue that a “classless” nirvana exists in which workers and “job creators” coexist in economic peace and harmony is beyond me.

Update: Yes, it’s supposed to be bale. Homonyms are a bitch. (h/t RK)

Not exactly the Penn-tagon Papers

“It’s not even clear that the documents had been in Biden’s possession”

Documents discovered in Donald Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago.

The GOP is beside itself over news that some classified documents were found in November among papers stored at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. by Biden’s own attorneys. Isn’t this just what prompted the FBI to investigate Donald Trump, they demand? Where’s the outrage? Where are the jackbooted thugs? Where’s Attorney General Merrick Garland’s investigation?

Twitter quipster Jeff Tiedrich put the affair in context, tweeting, “weird how Joe Biden found classified documents and voluntarily returned them without claiming he magically declassified them, or saying the FBI planted them, or lying about having already returned them, or needing to have his shitty golf motel searched. what game is Biden playing”?

Indeed, reports indicate the White House notified authorities immediately and the National Archives retrieved the Penn documents the next day.

Clearly, the papers surfacing is unwelcome news for the Biden administration. As is news that a search turned up a second batch this week. It is also a complicating factor for special counsel Jack Smith who is already investigating the Trump/Mar-a-Lago hoard. But so far the new documents appear more of a political than a legal stumblingblock for Smith. Trump claimed his purloined documents as his own and fought the government’s efforts to reclaim them. Smith is investigating Trump and his lawyers for obstruction.

Washington Post:

“This is under review by the Department of Justice. I’m not going to go beyond what the president shared,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said, declining to respond to several questions about whether additional properties — including Biden’s Delaware homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach — had been searched.

White House officials have said that they are cooperating with the Justice Department and that Biden’s lawyers quickly handed over the documents to the National Archives and Records Administration — the agency tasked with handling presidential records.

[…]

To review the discovery of Biden classified documents, Garland tapped U.S. Attorney John R. Lausch Jr. of Chicago, a holdover from the Trump administration. Depending on what this initial investigation yields, Garland could decide to appoint a special counsel.

As MAGA Republicans rage and run cover for Trump, Marcy Wheeler notes problems with the reporting to date (she takes CBS to task here). For one, Judge “Beryl Howell might yet hold Trump or his lawyers in contempt for failing to return all the classified documents in his possession.”

“Another amusing difference is that for the entirety of the Trump Administration, Biden continued to have clearance; Biden decided not to continue intelligence briefings for Trump shortly after he launched a coup attempt,” Wheeler adds (emphasis mine):

But there’s something else missing from the coverage so far: it’s not even clear that the documents had been in Biden’s possession, as opposed to another of his former staffers at the Obama White House. As CBS noted, Tony Blinken was the Managing Director at the start, followed by Steve Richetti.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for example, was the center’s managing director in 2018. Steve Richetti, who now serves as a top White House aide to Mr. Biden, was managing director of the center in 2019.

While Blinken had already returned to the private sector by 2017, Richetti was Biden’s Chief of Staff when they left.

One thing Chicago US Attorney John Lausch has been investigating is how the documents ended up at Penn Biden.

Lau[s]ch’s review will examine, in part, how the documents got from Mr. Biden’s vice-presidential office to the Penn Biden Center.

In other words, it might not even be a Biden thing. It could be one of his staffers — and it could be a more serious issue if someone was found to have intentionally taken documents with them when they left the White House, or was using them in the interim. It could be Richetti who did it, for example (which would be one reason among many not to reveal the investigation publicly before discovering how the documents got where they were).

There will be insane reporting ahead — there already has been.

And virtually none of it will report that Trump is still suspected of hoarding classified documents.

Nope. Not likely.

The Alchemist: RIP Jeff Beck

Goddam it all, anyway. This one hurts.

The music world has lost one of its greatest vocalists. That is not a typo. Jeff Beck could make a guitar speak, in every sense of the word. He rarely stepped up to the mic during the course of his 60+ year career, but whenever he set his fingers to a fret board, he told you a story; sometimes joyous and life-affirming, sometimes sad and melancholy…but it never meandered into masturbatory self-indulgence. Every note held import, serving a distinct narrative that had a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Like all great artists, he was loathe to dawdle too long in a comfort zone; he never stopped exploring, pushing the boundaries of his instrument ever-further with each performance (whether on stage or in the studio). While he was generally relegated to the “rock” section, he could slide effortlessly from blues, boogie, and metal to funk, R & B, soul, jazz and fusion (more often than not, all within the same number).

He made it appear easy as an oil change, but I’m sure he put in his “10,000 hours” of practice at some point (when he wasn’t tinkering with his cars, which was his “happy place” off stage). I’ve been playing guitar for 50 years, and no matter how closely I’ve studied his fingers in concert videos, I am stymied as to how he wrestled those sounds from his axe. All I know is that it had something to do with the whammy bar, volume knobs, thumb-picking, and a magic ring. It’s some kind of alchemy way beyond my ken.

I saw Beck in L.A. with The Jan Hammer Group, circa 1976 at the Starlight Amphitheater. I was in the nosebleed section, but I. was. mesmerized. A command performance.

You’ve heard the term “musician’s musician”? The Twitter tributes confirm he was:

And how can we forget his Antonioni moment?

Even from somewhere out there in the ether, he’s expressing what I’m feeling right now, as I listen to my favorite Beck instrumental. Rest in peace, maestro. Rave on.

House GOP eagerly jumps on the new third rail

Huffington Post reports on the latest House atrocity:

House Republicans are set to vote on a pair of abortion bills this week, just a few months after their disappointing performance in the 2022 midterm elections that even some top Republicans like former President Donald Trump attributed to extreme abortion policies.

[…]

The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act would require physicians to provide life-sustaining care to infants born after an attempted abortion and threatens doctors with criminal penalties if they don’t comply. Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) reintroduced the legislation earlier this week, along with original Republican co-sponsors Reps. Steve Scalise (La.) and Kat Cammack (Fla.).

“All children should have the right to receive life saving care, especially those who survive an abortion,” Wagner said in a Monday statement.

“The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act will provide common sense protections for innocent children and their mothers and will ensure all babies receive the essential care they need at an incredibly vulnerable moment. It pains me that this fight has to be fought at all, but medical care for babies should not be a partisan issue.”

But similar to other anti-choice legislation, the bill is chock-full of misinformation and creates more barriers to care. Reproductive rights advocates and physicians critical of the bill argue that it’s nearly impossible for infants to be born alive during abortions later in pregnancy. Bills like this are also redundant: Murder is already illegal in the U.S. If that’s not enough, the rights of an infant or newborn are already protected by a 2002 law that codified that infants have the same rights as any other human.

These bills promote inaccurate ideas about why people get abortions later in pregnancy. The majority of abortions performed later in pregnancy are medically necessary to save the life of the pregnant person or necessary because of a fatal fetal abnormality; they’re not elective.

This legislation could take away a pregnant person’s power to decide what medical interventions they want to receive during an already-emotional time, possibly forcing physicians to prolong an infant’s life for a short period of time before it dies. In certain cases, this could take away parents’ opportunities to hold their infants.

Anti-choice advocates and lawmakers have attempted to pass “born alive” bills on the state and federal levels for years. Most recently, a “born alive” ballot initiative failed in Montana during the midterm elections in November. If Wagner’s bill becomes law, it would be more restrictive than other anti-choice bills on the books in 32 states, according to the Family Research Council, an anti-abortion group that supports the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.

The right just loves this ghoulish stuff where hey get to pontificate about “baby parts” and saving baby “survivors.” It thrills the anti abortion zealots and makes everyone else just cringe so it’s a potent political weapon.

It was a big liability for them in the last election but I guess they figure everyone will get used to abortion being illegal for millions of women by the next election so there’s no harm in giving their wingnuts what they want right now. I wonder. This issue feels like a new third rail.

Update: They did it.

The GOP-led House voted on Wednesday to pass a bill that would require health care providers to try to preserve the life of an infant in the rare case that a baby is born alive during or after an attempted abortion. The bill is not expected to be taken up in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but passage in the House serves as a messaging opportunity for the new Republican majority. The vote was 220 to 210.

Under the bill, health providers who fail to comply with the requirements for care could face fines or up to five years in prison.

Biden on the upswing

But still, nobody knows nothin’

That’s just depressing. People really are clueless. A couple more results:

It’s going to take a lot to wring this out of the polity. People get hooked on beliefs that the economy is in the dirt and continue to believe it long after it’s not. The media doesn’t help.

On another topic, I found this interesting:

The partisan breakdown isn’t all that surprising. We know the white, right wingers won’t wear masks. But I was surprised to see so many young people saying they do wear them. It makes sense that old people wouldn’t because so many of us are Republicans. But young people doing it is pure altruism for most of them. They are not in great danger personally. They’re protecting others. Nice.

Plus 1000

This piece by Jill Filipovic on the latest “cancel culture” flap hits on a number of important issues that I think are worthy of airing. I don’t weigh in on this stuff a whole lot because we’re in a period of rapid social transformation that I may not be the best person to interpret. I’m old, I have lived my life in a period of free-wheeling discourse that has had both good and bad effect and I’m frankly not entirely sure of myself. The very definition of academic freedom is being re-defined on a daily basis, for good and ill. My instincts may not be reliable in this area.

I’m taking all that in, trying to balance the new information and attitude with my reflexive opposition to restrictions on thought and speech. Having said that, I am not in the least bit insecure about saying that liberals must stand up to religious authoritarianism. If not that, then what? Filipovic gets to that and more. It’s a very thought-provoking read:

There’s been a viral story making the rounds over the past week about a truly egregious incident at Hamline University, a small liberal arts college in Minnesota. In a course on global art history, adjunct professor Erika López Prater showed an image of a 14th-century painting that depicted the prophet Muhammad. On the class syllabus, she noted that the course would include images of religious figures, including Buddha and Muhammad, and that students could reach out if they had concerns—none did. Before showing the image, she told students that she was going to show it, and gave them the option to opt out—none did.

And yet for showing the image, she was essentially let go.

The Hamline University story is a shocking one, and it deserves the outrage and attention it’s getting. But before we dig into what exactly happened, I’d like to note that it’s only one in a larger body of troubling moves to cater to the authoritarian impulses of religious tyrants—those who want to shut down the kind of intellectual inquiry, academic freedom, and general excellence that make universities what they are, in favor of kowtowing to religious fundamentalism.

For example: Gov. Ron DeSantis is appointing a string of reactionary anti-intellectual nut jobs to the board of trustees of New College in Florida, a publicly funded liberal arts institution; they plan to turn this venerated institution into a right-wing Christian school. (“We want to provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values,” anti-education crusader Christopher Rufo, one of the new board members, told Michelle Goldberg.) Books were banned 2,500 times in 32 states, according to PEN America—and most of these book bans were pushed by conservatives. The effort to ban books that so much as recognize the existence of LGBT people or address racism has gone international, as reactionary, often religious conservatives have been emboldened by right-wing censorship in the U.S. In North Carolina, a publicly funded charter school seeks to impart “traditional values” upon its students—which means conservative Christian values. The school requires girls to wear skirts, and seeks to teach its students “chivalry,” which its founder defines as a system in which women and girls are “regarded as a fragile vessel that men are supposed to take care of and honor.”

This is all wholly unacceptable in any academic setting. And liberals should stand up against illiberal acts, even when those acts are carried out in the name of a minority religion in the U.S.

Many American liberals are rightly sympathetic to religious minorities in our country. And certainly people should be free to believe and worship freely without fear of harassment or discrimination (assuming, of course, that the mode of worship doesn’t interfere with the lives of others). Muslims in the United States have been targeted, including by the former president; their entire religion has been smeared and slandered, and some individuals have faced discrimination and even physical violence. Liberals rightly stand against that.

But standing up for a religious minority’s right to exist, believe, and worship freely does not mean leaving all your other values at the door, and allowing the most vocal and conservative members of that minority to demand censorship or compliance with their views.

Which brings us back to Hamline University. After the professor showed the image of Muhammad—a famous painting, and necessary to any course on global art history—a Muslim student in the class complained to the administration; other students backed her up, saying that they were also offended, as a conservative but widely held interpretation of Islam bars Muslims from looking at images of Muhammad.

“As a Muslim and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them,” the student, Aram Wedatalla, said. But here’s the thing: She was shown the exact level of respect that community members typically ask of one another. I would actually argue she was shown much more respect. She was also shown much more respect than we require professors show students in the classroom. It’s what she is asking for—that images of Muhammad never be shown, and by extension that everyone else, no matter what their views or beliefs, behave according to her own conservative religious rules—that is profoundly disrespectful, authoritarian, and anti-intellectual.

Because of these complaints, the professor, an adjunct, was let go. According to the administration, her decision to show these images—despite contextualizing them, treating them respectfully, and giving students the option to opt out—was “Islamophobic,” and placed on par with hate and bias incidents. In this case, the apparently extremely delicate sensibilities of a handful of little religious tyrants (and their apparent inability to read a syllabus or listen to the professor’s words) “should have superseded academic freedom,” according to an email from the university’s president, Fayneese S. Miller.

The Miller email is truly a startling read. It honestly seems like it was written by a teenage Tumblr user who, having come into contact with some new and exciting ideas about social justice, seeks to impose them widely and lecture perceived wrongdoers gleefully. She writes that “when we harm, we should listen rather than debate the merits of or extent of that harm” and that “the classroom incident is only one of several instances in which their religious beliefs have been challenged.” (God forbid a college student have their beliefs challenged.) But this is where it goes really off the rails:

As a caring community, there are times when a healthy examination of expression is not only prudent, but necessary. This is particularly the case when we know that our expression has potential to cause harm. When that happens, we must care enough to find other ways to make our voices and viewpoints heard.

Perspectives should be informed, mindful and critical, as befits an education steeped in the tenets of a liberal arts education. We believe in academic freedom, but it should not and cannot be used to excuse away behavior that harms others.

I realize I sound like a crotchety old conservative here, but college classrooms should not be “safe spaces.” They can’t be safe spaces. They should be respectful spaces, and professors and students alike should treat each other with consideration, but “cause no emotional harm” is not, in fact, a value to which academic institutions should aspire, or an ideal they can ever realistically reach—especially when “this is harmful” has become an easy cudgel to use in order to get one’s way.

That email was egregious enough, but illiberal behavior, and the coddling of reactionary religious demands, didn’t stop there. What’s different about this case, though, is that those demands cloaked themselves in the language of social justice and progressive values. Showing the image was “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic,” wrote David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence, who also deemed the professor’s actions “unacceptable” and spelled out a plan to deal with “bias and hate incidents.” To help repair the apparent Islamophobia of showing a Persian masterpiece made by a Muslim for Muslim audiences in class only to students who consented to seeing it, the university would co-host a forum on Islamophobia with the Muslim Student Association.

At that forum, the primary speaker was invited from off campus: Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Hussein, who as far as I know is not an art historian, declared that there was “absolutely no benefit” to the professor showing an image of one of the most famous pieces of Islamic art in a global art history class. The image, he said, was “blasphemy.”

“If this institution wants to value those students,” he said, “it cannot have incidents like this happen. If somebody wants to teach some controversial stuff about Islam, go teach it at the local library.”

I … am not totally sure where to start here, except to say that college absolutely should “teach some controversial stuff” about Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and literally anything else. When I was in college, my art history professor showed us Piss ChristThe Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili (a Black Virgin Mary affixed with elephant dung and cutouts from porn mags), and this Robert Mapplethorpe image, which is about as explicit as it gets. (Don’t click that at work or in front of kids, or at least know: It goes right to the image.) Part of the lesson was about art causing controversy—both of those images prompted wholesale conservative Christian freakouts, including efforts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. And liberals, for the most part, were on the side of artistic freedom and expression, rightly pointing out the censoriousness of those who sought to have this art go unmade and un-viewed because they found it offensive.

As far as I know, no one in my art history class whined to the administration that they felt unsafe in the classroom because of blasphemous art. And if they had, I do not think many students would have sided with them.

In college we also read parts of the Bible and the Quran, both texts that one religion or another finds blasphemous. In law school, I took a course on feminist interpretations of Islamic law, which many Muslims surely find blasphemous. This is a good thing; this is one of the reasons the academy exists. (Also, there is no dumber crime or complaint than blasphemy; any all-powerful God can certainly handle her own business and hopefully has pretty thick skin by now.)

Take Islam out of it and similar examples make these values clear. When an Orthodox newspaper in New York photoshopped Hillary Clinton out of a famous photograph of Barack Obama and his staff watching the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden, there was widespread outrage. If an Orthodox Jewish student complained about seeing images of women in art history class and demanded that professors who show images of women be terminated, would we be particularly sympathetic, even if he said we were “disrespecting and offending” his religion? What if a Christian fundamentalist student objected to the teaching of evolution because it contradicted her belief in biblical literalism? What if a Hindu student demanded that the cafeteria be fully vegetarian because meat-eating offended his religious views?

That is what is happening here. The student isn’t saying “I should have the option to not view these images.” She had that option. She is saying “No one should have the option to view these images, because they offend my particular religious beliefs.” Sorry, but no.

And yet, still, it gets worse.

College is about inquiry and ideas and testing boundaries; I bet a lot of us held views at 19 years old that we no longer hold now. If, like me, you were a young progressive person recently armed with the revelatory language of social justice, you probably did a lot of “calling out” and social justice showboating in college. (I sure did, and boy was I obnoxious.) But the adults in the room are supposed to be the bulwarks, who engage and listen and reflect but don’t immediately cave to the most asinine of student demands.

Here, most of the adults seem to have caved. For example: Nur Mood, assistant director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations at Hamline, told the student newspaper, “This [incident is] much deeper and it’s something that in a million years, I never expected that it would happen here at Hamline. I hope this is the last time I see something similar to this.”

Not everyone lined up and agreed that being accused of blasphemy should be cause for losing one’s job in the 21st century. Professor Mark Berkson, the chair of Hamline’s religious studies department, wrote an essay for the Hamline student newspaper, which is called the Oracle, defending the professor and asking what, exactly, is Islamophobic about showing a great masterpiece of Islamic art. The Oracle published the essay, but then pulled it. They then published a staff editorial on “Journalism, minimizing harm, and trauma,” which honestly makes me pretty worried about the future of journalism. “Those in our community have expressed that a letter we published has caused them harm,” the editorial says. “We have decided, as an editorial board, to take it down.” The newspaper “will not participate in conversations where a person must defend their lived experience and trauma as topics of discussion or debate.” They continued: “It is not a publication’s job to challenge or define sensitive experiences or trauma. If and when situations arise where these stories are shared, it is our responsibility to listen to and carry them in the most supportive, respectful, safe and beneficial way for the story’s stakeholders and our readers.”

The thing is, though, it is absolutely a publication’s job to tell the whole of a story, even if that story involves someone who said they were harmed or traumatized, and even when that person doesn’t like arguments against their requested reprisal for that harm. The kind of argument put forward by the Oracle (and, more troublingly, by the university’s president) is that any claim of harm or trauma should simply have the power to shut down all conversation or inquiry. And it’s a particularly powerful and insidious argument, especially coming, as it often does, not only after a stand-alone claim of harm, but after a demand that said harm result in a penalty for the person who did the allegedly harmful thing. It positions disagreeing with both a claim and a demand for action as perpetuating that harm. There is no way to respond other than to say, “Yes, you’re right. I am listening.”

But people are human. We are often venal, selfish, stupid, power-hungry, and dishonest. And even if a person is being entirely genuine, giving any claim of any harm the total power to shut down inquiry and conversation, and the total power to allow the claimant to set the terms of recompense is a very, very bad and destructive idea.

This isn’t a right-wing “fuck your feelings” argument. It is instead an argument that feelings are not the sum total of reality, nor worthy of universal deference.

We are in a particular cultural moment in which claims of harm and trauma are being taken much more seriously than ever before, especially within liberal and progressive institutions. For the most part, this is a good thing. But there has also been more than a bit of overcorrection. It has become clear that claims of harm and trauma can be used to demand change—to get someone fired, to make someone a social pariah, even to put someone in jail. That isn’t always bad—there are plenty of people who fully deserve to be fired, or be pariahs, or go to jail for their bad acts. But it’s not the claim of harm and trauma in and of itself that justifies punishment; it’s the whole story, the context, the actual wrongdoing, and not just the feelings of the person who says they were wronged. We do have to ask: Was this a reasonable act? Is this a reasonable response? Should the person accused of doing harm be penalized, and if so, how?

Unfortunately, the party line at Hamline seems to be that asking those questions—questions that are integral and necessary for truth-finding and anything resembling justice—is itself a harmful act. Allowing any claim of harm to be both unchallenged and a catalyst for punishment quite simply puts far too much power in the hands of potential bad actors—or even good people with silly or bad ideas, who just get too far over their skis.

And yet even after this story broke, the administration appeared to double down.

“To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith,” reads a statement from Miller. “It was important that our Muslim students, as well as all other students, feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”

That’s true. But you don’t show someone respect by treating them like a fragile little thing that might shatter if they have to live in the world, surrounded by people with different views and beliefs.

This incident is making headlines because conservatives have latched onto it as another example of left-wing “cancel culture.” But how a conservative interpretation of Islam that gets a sensitive and thoughtful art history lecturer fired is “left-wing” is beyond me. It is true, though, that many people on the left have stayed quiet about this one, because, well, one doesn’t want to aid a perceived enemy, and perhaps because we want to be sensitive to Muslims who are undeniably often mistreated in the United States.

But standing up not just for academic freedom but for freedom from religious domination in what should be secular spaces is a core liberal value. That the religious value imposed and used to punish is one that comes from a religion that is in this country a minority shouldn’t actually make a difference here.

Chutzpah doesn’t begin to describe it

CNN reports:

Rep. James Comer, in one of his first moves as House Oversight Chairman, is seeking information from the Treasury Department about the Biden family’s financial transactions and calling on a handful of former Twitter executives to testify at a public hearing.

The new round of letters from the committee come as House Republicans are looking to flex their investigative might and make good on promises to delve into the Biden family finances and alleged political influence over technology companies after Twitter temporarily suppressed a 2020 story about Hunter Biden and his laptop.

“Now that Democrats no longer have one-party rule in Washington, oversight and accountability are coming,” Comer said of his panel’s investigation into Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s business dealings. “This investigation is a top priority for House Republicans during the 118th Congress.”

They had zero concerns about this:

Donald Trump Jr. arrived in India on Tuesday for a week-long visit, and his trip has already revealed a couple of things.

First, it’s clear that the Trump administration is still embroiled in huge conflicts of interest. And second, it’s evident that the Trump brand, though toxic at home, commands surprising power in the world’s second most populous country.

President Trump’s eldest son will be spending his time in India promoting Trump-branded luxury apartments across the country. He’ll be meeting with real estate brokers and potential buyers throughout the week in his family business’s biggest market outside the US.

He’s also offering a special reward to Indians who buy property from him: He’ll join them for an intimate meal.

Indian newspapers have been running advertisements that promise homebuyers willing to pay a roughly $38,000 booking fee an opportunity to “join Mr. Donald Trump Jr. for a conversation and dinner.”

Government ethics experts in the US are appalled by that prospect, and say that the arrangement encourages Indians — especially those with ties to India’s government — to use purchases of Trump-branded property as a way to gain favor with the Trump administration.

Or this:

As Jared Kushner’s father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, was running for President, the Kushners were pitching Qatari investors to help bail out the building [666 5th Avenue]. And just weeks after his father Charles reportedly failed to reach a deal with Qatar’s minister of finance, Jared Kushner, in his capacity as a senior adviser to President Trump, reportedly played a central role in supporting a blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Kushner never disclosed his meeting with Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the blockade to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at the time. Later, a financial company tied to Qatar brokered an especially valuable deal to rescue the Kushner Companies’ property at 666 Fifth Avenue.

Or this:

 The red carpet was laid out Saturday for President Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr, the guests of honor at a plush event that brought out Dubai’s business elite and government officials to toast the launch of the Trump International Golf Club.

The guests, a mix of foreigners and locals, walked past lighted palm trees and were greeted by a line of Western women dressed in black with cream-colored shawls. Waiters served dim sum, quail egg canapes and lemon meringue tarts as an eight-person string orchestra played Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.”

It was the first opening of a Trump-branded property since the president’s inauguration, illuminating how much his business interests are thriving despite concerns over potential conflicts of interests that could open the presidency up to foreign influence. While he has given control of his global empire to his children, Trump has not divested his ownership, which means he will benefit from any commercial success of the golf resort.

Those are just a few examples of Trump’s overwhelming conflicts of interest and influence peddling as president. Now he’s running again and doing it again. The Republicans having the nerve to turn Joe Biden’s misfit son’s influence peddling years ago into this level of scandal is simply mind boggling.

Of course, the Democrats didn’t go after the Trumps when they had the chance and I have never understood it. Trump was the most corrupt president in history, right out in the open and everyone just shrugged and said “waddayagonna do?” It was political malpractice.

By the way Trump is running again. maybe the Senate could take a look at some of this stuff before he does it again?

Camelot in Tallahassee

Meet the MAGA JFK and Jackie

With all the hoopla in Washington since the Republican House majority came to town, it’s easy to forget that clown car is only performing in one ring of the GOP circus. Hard as it is to take your eyes off that show, it’s also important to pay attention to some of the other acts in state houses around the country — and none is more riveting than what’s going on down in the laboratory of anti-democracy known as Florida.

Gov. Ron DeSantis was sworn in for his second term last week in Tallahassee with a two-day extravaganza that guests called “DeSantis-Palooza.” It featured an ostentatious outdoor inaugural ceremony on the steps of the Old Capitol preceded by a prayer meeting with 80 to 100 people from the faith community, followed by a “Toast to 1 Million Mamas” hosted by Casey DeSantis at the governor’s mansion. Later that night Ron and Casey entered their glittering inaugural ball for 4,000 fans to the strains of the campaign song “Sweet Florida” by Donnie and Johnny Van Zant (former members of Lynyrd Skynyrd and .38 Special), which features these inspirational lyrics:

You can take it to the bank he don’t care what Brandon thinks at the White House
Yeah, he’s fighting for the right to keep our state free (free)
Well he’s taking on the swamp and he’s calling out Dr. Fauci (Fauci!)
He’s the only one fighting for you and me (you and me)
Yeah, we’re free! (Yeah, we’re free!)

It must have been a breathtaking moment. The Republican faithful in attendance told reporters they believed they were witnessing the rebirth of John and Jackie Kennedy’s Camelot.

But never say that DeSantis is all talk and no action. He got right to work, appointing culture-war guru Christopher Rufo to the board of New College of Florida, the state’s prestigious public liberal arts school, with the stated intention of turning it into a hardcore right-wing institution modeled on Hillsdale College, the Christian school in Michigan that has become hugely influential in conservative intellectual circles. (Salon’s Kathryn Joyce published a three-part series on Hillsdale last year.) As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times writes, this is part of DeSantis’ “broader quest to crush any hint of progressivism in public education, a quest he’d likely take national if he ever became president.”

The crusade against public education has been a hallmark of DeSantis’ Florida tenure so far. He pushed through the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prohibits teachers from speaking about gender identity or sexual orientation through third grade and proscribes any discussion of said issues “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate” all the way through high school. Educators have no clear idea how to implement such a rigid yet ambiguous restriction on free speech in the classroom.

Teachers aren’t the only ones DeSantis seeks to enjoin from speaking about things of which the governor, acting as the state, disapproves. He also wants to prevent businesses from speaking out against his policies, as he tried to do with the Walt Disney Company when it spoke up for its LGBTQ employees. Another bill he signed, the “Stop WOKE Act,”  restricts conversations about race in schools and businesses, granting students and workers the right to sue if they believe a classroom lesson or workplace training course caused them to “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” due to their race. (It doesn’t say that this protection is afforded exclusively to white people, but that’s the implication.)

Last November that bill was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled it violated the First Amendment and that DeSantis appears to think that “the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.'” He clearly does think that. Despite the judge’s ruling, the law has had its intended effect — untenured professors in Florida colleges are adjusting their curricula.

DeSantis also recently announced that he will form a grand jury to investigate whether the COVID vaccines were a corrupt scheme to enrich Democratic politicians and sicken people with junk science. That comes after he enacted a series of counterproductive laws and regulations during the pandemic that, as the Palm Beach Post reported, “killed more people aged 65 and over in Florida than any other state in the nation … leaving the far-more populous states of California and Texas eating our dust. ” But boy oh boy, did he ever own the libs.

DeSantis’ war on trans kids is especially heartbreaking. (He even invited one of the cruelest of transphobic online trolls, the proprietor of Libs of TikTok, to stay in the governor’s mansion.) Leaving no transphobic stone un-turned, he’s now investigating drag shows

Perhaps most infamous are the execrable stunts using human beings as pawns in DeSantis’ unrelenting PR campaign to prove that he’s the most odious governor in the United States. His flamboyant arrests of former felons who had been erroneously told they were eligible to vote are being systematically dismissed by the courts, but undoubtedly served their purpose by persuading some people who could legally have voted not to take the chance. That move thrilled DeSantis’ core supporters, voters who loved watching former convicts (most of them Black) punished for the crime of voting.

It’s worth noting that DeSantis has been unusually cagey about abortion rights, at least compared to most hard-right culture warriors. He has vaguely promised to sign more “pro-life” legislation beyond the 15-week abortion ban already enacted, but has not offered specifics, understanding that it’s a perilous issue for a national politician. It will be interesting to watch him try to thread that needle with the zealots in the Florida legislature.

Of course we have to mention DeSantis’ despicable plot to lure asylum seekers in Texas, hundreds of miles west of his own state to board planes for Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, purely to score crass political points that have nothing to do with Florida, which has no international border. The motives behind that episode are still being unpacked and there is some evidence that taxpayer money was diverted to high-level DeSantis associates. But public corruption is considered a smart move among Republican officials these days, so it’s doubtful anything will ever come of it.

Those are just a few examples of what we’ve seen from Ron DeSantis over the past few years. With the exception of the latest brouhaha over “woke” M&M candies, I don’t think there’s one culture-war issue that DeSantis hasn’t jumped into with both feet. One shudders to contemplate what he may go after next but you can be sure he’ll find something. He believes this is his ticket to the Republican presidential nomination, and at least on that front he’s way ahead of a certain other Florida resident who’s starting to look like yesterday’s man.