Not everyone worships Florida, Governor. In fact, when you’re talking to people outside Florida you might want to keep in mind that they live in states that they are proud of and it sounds like you are saying they live in hellscapes compared to yours.
You no doubt noticed that this came from Trump’s superpac. Ouch.
“The court holds that Harvard and UNC’s admissions programs violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment,” writes Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that colleges and universities must stop considering race in admissions, forcing institutions of higher education to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies.
In a 6-3 decision, the court struck down admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest private and public colleges, respectively.
There’s not enough time to comment on this 237 pg. opinion by Chief Justice Roberts in cases involving affirmative action admissions at Harvard and UNC, but here’s Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog again:
1)The court says that it has “permitted race-based admissions only within the confines of narrow restrictions. University programs must comply with strict scrutiny, they may never use race as a stereotype or negative, and — at some point — they must end.”
2)The Harvard and UNC programs, Roberts writes, “however well intentioned and implemented in good faith,” “fail each of these criteria.”
3)Here’s the end of the Court’s opinion: “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”
“Sotomayor dissents, joined by Kagan and Jackson as it applies to the Harvard case. Jackson dissents in the UNC case, joined by SOtomayor and Kagan,” Howe writes.
Watch for commentary later. That is all.
You know the drill. Good news for Democrats is always bad news for Democrats somehow. No accomplishment goes untarnished in the both-sides press. The real question is whether the voting public will give President Joe Biden credit for improving their lives before the 2024 election. First, they’ll need to feel it.
John Cassidy reviews some of President Joe Biden’s economic highlights for The New Yorker:
In the Build Back Better economic plan that Biden laid out during his 2020 Presidential campaign, he promised to boost investment in American manufacturing and bring back jobs that had been offshored. After entering the White House, he didn’t get his entire economic agenda through Congress. But, taken together, the new spending, tax credits, and investment subsidies that were contained in the infrastructure bill, the chips Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act amount to an ambitious new industrial policy, which aspires to strengthen American high-tech manufacturing, make the green-energy transition a reality, and create well-paying jobs. Earlier this year, I argued that Biden’s industrial initiative would ultimately be seen as his most significant policy contribution.
Although this policy has run into skepticism in some quarters, there is evidence that it’s already having a big impact. In April, the Financial Times counted “more than 75 large-scale manufacturing announcements,” containing pledges to spend more than two hundred billion dollars combined, since the passage of the chips and Inflation Reduction acts. Foreign companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and LG Energy Solution, a South Korean producer of batteries for electric vehicles, have moved to secure their place in the vast U.S. market, as have big domestic corporations, like Intel and General Motors. These manufacturing announcements are continuing, and the surge in investment and construction has become visible in aggregate economic statistics. “Inflation-adjusted construction spending in the manufacturing industry has absolutely skyrocketed since June 2022, from $90 billion to $189 billion,” the economics writer Noah Smith pointed out earlier this month, on his Substack. “Factory construction spending more than doubled in one year, after being essentially constant for decades. And it perfectly lines up with the passage of the chips Act in July 2022 and the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022.”
Biden himself spoke in Chicago on Wednesday of ending the reign of trickle down economics that took hold during the Reagan administration. So long as the macro economy fed by tax cuts for the wealthy improved, as the business press measured it, the rest of America would benefit. But that didn’t happen. Instead, economic inequality grew to staggering heights not seen since the Gilded Age. Biden means to rebuild the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down.”
The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times (not approvingly) have dubbed Biden’s program of renewed public investment in American infrastructure “Bidenomics.” Biden now embraces the term.
Heather Cox Richardson writes:
Central to Biden’s vision is the idea that the prosperity of the United States rests on its working people, rather than its elites. In Chicago he emphasized his administration’s focus on training and education, as well as its emphasis on the trades and unions. He also emphasized economic competition, noting that business consolidation has stifled innovation, reduced wages, made supply chains vulnerable, and raised costs for consumers.
To reduce the deficit that has exploded in the past decades and to pay for new programs, Biden reiterated the need for fair taxes on the wealthy and corporations after decades of cuts. “Big Oil made $200 billion last year and got a…$30 billion tax break,” he said, while billionaires pay an average of 8% in taxes, less than “a schoolteacher, a firefighter, or a cop.” He called for “making the tax code fair for everyone, making the wealthy and the super-wealthy and big corporations begin to pay their fair share, without raising taxes at all on the middle class.”
“We’re not going to continue down the trickle-down path as long as I’m president,” Biden said. “This is the moment we are finally going to make a break…. Here’s the simple truth about trickle-down economics: It didn’t represent the best of American capitalism, let alone America. It represented a moment where we walked away… from… how this country was built…. Bidenomics is just another way of saying: Restore the American Dream because it worked before. It’s rooted in what’s always worked best in this country: investing in America, investing in Americans. Because when we invest in our people, we strengthen the middle class, we see the economy grow. That benefits all Americans. That’s the American Dream.”
But it is not the conservative dream. While some Republicans voted for Biden’s investments, many did not. Now they want to take credit for them. Watch them try.
The Charleston Post and Courier notes, “A routine press conference on a federal grant for Charleston’s bus system put Republican U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace on the defensive after Democrats pounced that she actually voted against the bill that made it happen.”
Richardson cites Republicans Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln who condemned an economy run for the benefit of robber barons.
In his New Nationalism speech, TR pointed back to his revered predecessor, Republican president Abraham Lincoln, who believed that the government must serve the interests of ordinary people rather than those of elite southern enslavers. When South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond told the Senate in 1858 that society was made up of “mudsills” overseen by their betters, who directed their labor and, gathering the wealth they produced, used it to advance the country, Lincoln was outraged.
Society moved forward not at the hands of a wealthy elite, he countered, but through the hard work of ordinary men who constantly innovated. A community based on the work and wisdom of farmers, he said in 1859, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.” In office, Lincoln turned the government from protecting enslavers to advancing the interests of workingmen, including government support for higher education.
The Republican Party of Lincoln and Roosevelt lost its way. Democrat FDR’s New deal built out the world’s strongest middle class until in the Reagan era the robber barons roared back.
“Bidenomics is simply a new word for a time-honored American idea,” Richardson concludes. A sound one. A popular one. An equitable one.
Now if only the voting public will take notice.
Update: Thank you, Rick.
Mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin planned to capture Russia’s military leadership as part of last weekend’s mutiny, Western officials said, and he accelerated his plans after the country’s domestic intelligence agency became aware of the plot.
The plot’s premature launch was among the factors that could explain its ultimate failure after 36 hours, when Prigozhin called off an armed march on Moscow that had initially faced little resistance.
Prigozhin originally intended to capture Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s general staff, during a visit to a southern region that borders Ukraine that the two were planning. But the Federal Security Service, or FSB, found out about the plan two days before it was to be executed, according to Western officials.
Gen. Viktor Zolotov, commander of the National Guard of Russia, a domestic military force that reports directly to President Vladimir Putin, also said authorities knew about Prigozhin’s intentions before he launched his attempt.
“Specific leaks about preparations for a rebellion that would begin between June 22-25 were leaked from Prigozhin’s camp,” Zolotov told state media on Tuesday.
Western intelligence agencies also found out early about the plans by Prigozhin, Putin’s former confidant, by analyzing electronic communications intercepts and satellite imagery, according to a person familiar with the findings. Western officials said they believe the original plot had a good chance of success but failed after the conspiracy was leaked, forcing Prigozhin to improvise an alternative plan.
Still, the intelligence raises questions about the extent of Putin’s authority after Moscow failed to prevent Wagner troops from marching almost all the way to Moscow despite the Kremlin’s knowledge of the conspiracy, people familiar with the matter said.
Prigozhin’s plot relied on his belief that a part of Russia’s armed forces would join the rebellion and turn against their own commanders, according to this intelligence. The preparations included amassing large amounts of ammunition, fuel and hardware including tanks, armored vehicles and sophisticated mobile air defenses days before the attack, according to Western intelligence findings.
Made aware of the leak, Prigozhin was then forced to act sooner than planned on Friday and managed to capture the southern Russian city of Rostov, a key command point for the invasion of Ukraine. The ease with which Wagner’s troops took the city of one million that is home to a large military airport suggests that some regular forces commanders could have been part of the plot, according to Western intelligence.
Western officials said they believe Prigozhin had communicated his intentions to senior military officers, possibly including Gen. Sergei Surovikin, commander of the Russian aerospace force. It couldn’t be determined whether Surovikin passed this information on to the FSB, or how the agency found out about Prigozhin’s plans.
I guess this explains why Putin came out swinging calling Prigozhin a traitor. What it doesn’t explain is why Prigozhin has apparently been forgiven and allowed to simply go into exile in Belarus to count all the money he no doubt has stashed in safe places around the globe,
It’s a cliche I know, but I would stay away from open windows if I were him.
Jeremy Scahill at the Intercept has a fascinating article today about a Swedish engineer who investigated the Nord Stream pipeline explosion:
Andersson is not a professional investigator or a journalist, and his voyage was not sponsored by a government. By training, he is an engineer with a master’s degree in engineering physics. He had a successful career at Volvo and Boeing and worked on advanced programs used by commercial and military aircraft, including U.S. military aircraft. He had followed the developments of the Nord Stream bombing carefully, but it was not until journalist Seymour Hersh published his bombshell story alleging that President Joe Biden had personally ordered the destruction of the pipelines that he became obsessed with the mystery. The expedition to the bombing site grew out of that passion. Andersson freely admits that he was motivated by a desire to prove that Hersh’s narrative was correct. What he found was quite different.
[…]
Andersson had never heard of Hersh, but when he saw journalists and commentators he admired on Twitter defending the 85-year-old reporter from the almost immediate deluge of attacks on his credibility by prominent media and political figures, as well as the denials from the White House, his gut instinct was that the right people were attacking Hersh. “I saw he had a lot of respect. I mean, this is a very experienced journalist, and he knows how to deal with sources, to evaluate his sources.” Andersson’s sense was that Hersh’s story was “probably true,” but he was mostly interested in the voluminous details contained in his report.
I think we know who those journalists and commentators were … And people like this fellow are placing their faith in the wrong people.
Though it was not his aim, Andersson’s research directly challenges Hersh’s details, as well as the narrative preferred by analysts who believe Russia carried out the bombing. In short, his findings bolster the case that Ukraine — or private actors — could be responsible for the attack. As for his confirmation bias in favor of Hersh’s narrative, the expedition changed his mind. “It’s not the main hypothesis anymore in my mind. In my main story, they were fairly primitive divers going in with a big slab of explosives. They dug in next to the pipelines and they placed them. There were four separate dives, but there was simplified logistics. It could have been a small boat, and they made a big mistake, and they ended up putting one bomb on the wrong pipe. That’s the story that is in my mind.”
He still thinks the US might have been in on it (there are reports that the US Intelligence agencies had knowledge that Ukraine was planning such an attack in advance) but he doesn’t buy that it was a highly professional military operation. If anything it appears that is was slapdash and amateurish.
Read the whole thing if you’re into the details. It’s pretty weedy. But the upshot is that the widely held belief in certain circles that the US Military did it isn’t backed by the facts. But certain people ran with it anyway because it fits a certain pro-Russia Anti-Ukraine narrative. This guy went to a lot of trouble to prove them right and came up empty.
I’m sure you remember that and cringe whenever you think of it. Apparently, he kept this creepy stuff up in the White House:
Donald Trump’s “naked sexism,” including toward his own daughter, is described in a new book by Miles Taylor, the former Trump administration official who famously wrote a scathing op-ed about the former president under the pen name “Anonymous.”
Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, describes several incidents that made women in the Trump administration uncomfortable in his upcoming book Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, an extract of which was obtained exclusively by Newsweek.
These incidents included, the book says, claims by aides that Trump made lewd comments about his daughter Ivanka’s appearance and talked about “what it might be like to have sex with her.” This prompted a rebuke from his chief of staff, the book says.
It comes after several former staffers last month spoke about Trump’s pattern of behaving inappropriately with women while president, after a New York jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming journalist E. Jean Carroll. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and is appealing the Carroll judgment, but his alleged behavior toward women may impact his chances of securing another term in the White House in 2024.
“There still are quite a few female leaders from the Trump administration who have held their tongues about the unequal treatment they faced in the administration at best, and the absolute naked sexism they experienced with the hands of Donald Trump at worst,” Taylor told Newsweek.
In his book, Taylor describes Trump’s “undisguised sexism” toward the women in his administration, from relatively low-level aides to cabinet secretaries.
He recalls witnessing such behavior first-hand in meetings with Trump and Kirstjen Nielsen, who was secretary of homeland security from 2017 to 2019.
“When we were with him, Kirstjen did her best to ignore the president’s inappropriate behavior,” Taylor writes in his book. “He called her ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey,’ and critiqued her makeup and outfits.”
After a crass comment from Trump, he recalls Nielsen whispering to him: “Trust me, this is not a healthy workplace for women.” Nielsen has been contacted for comment.
He also recalled that Kellyanne Conway, who served as senior counselor, had once referred to Trump as a “misogynistic bully” after a meeting during which he had “berated” several female leaders in the administration.
Trump had lashed out at Nielsen and other White House staff about the border during that March 2019 meeting, according to a source familiar with the incident.
A source in Conway’s office denied she made the comment. “That is a lie,” the source told Newsweek. “Despite trying to resuscitate the 15 minutes of fame, Miles Taylor should have stayed ‘Anonymous.'”
Taylor also recalled how during one Oval Office meeting, Trump thought he saw Sarah Huckabee Sanders, then White House press secretary, in the room outside it.
It turned out to be one of his personal assistants, not Sanders. “Whoops,” Trump responded, according to Taylor. “I was going to say, ‘Man, Sarah, you’ve lost a lot of weight!'”
Sanders, now the governor of Arkansas, has been contacted for comment.
According to Taylor’s book, the worst of the behavior was Trump’s lewd comments about his own daughter.
“Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump‘s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter,” Taylor writes.
“Afterward, Kelly retold that story to me in visible disgust. Trump, he said, was ‘a very, very evil man.'”
Trump’s spokesperson has been contacted for comment. Kelly, who was White House chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, has been contacted for comment.
Taylor says he believes Trump remains unchanged as he leads the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and fears a second Trump term could be far worse.
“He’s a pervert, he’s difficult to deal with,” the source told Newsweek. “This is still the same man and, incredibly, we’re considering electing him to the presidency again.”
And all these right wing culture warriors who are freaking out about cat boxes in the classroom and calling Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden pedophiles just love this guy.
Look at that video again.
Update: And this one.
Conservatives have been screaming about socialists scheming to destroy everything Real Americans hold dear for as long as anyone alive can remember. Going back more than a hundred years to the first Red Scare in 1919, when the government rounded up thousands of socialists, anarchists and communists during the Palmer raids, there have been periodic paroxysms of outrage aimed at this perennial boogeyman.
In the 1920s and 30s it was evoked to oppose the labor movement and the policies of President Roosevelt as he tried to bring the country back from the Great Depression. After World War II anti-Communism became the official foreign policy of both parties and the Republicans began to use it as a cudgel to beat the Democratic party politically. Throughout the 1940s and 50s they focused as much on “the enemy within” as America’s cold war adversaries.
The House UnAmerican Activities Committee “investigated” anyone who had once been associated with the American Communist Party gradually expanding their probe into anyone they suspected of being insufficiently patriotic or those whose political influence they believed was harmful to American culture. Then along came Joseph McCarthy who waved around supposed lists of names of Soviet spies or “fellow travelers” he said had infiltrated the US Government and the military. This went on for years and years, ruining the lives of untold numbers of people.
The fever finally broke after more than a decade of non-stop Communist witch-hunting and the “Communist” accusation fell out of favor even as anti-Communism remained very potent politically among hawks of both parties. But the bipartisan consensus broke around the Vietnam war which finally shook the nation’s belief in the existential struggle. Nixon went to China and it was only a few years later that the Berlin Wall came down.
But none of that stopped the Republicans from hurling the “S” word at every program the Democrats supported, from voting rights to Medicare to affirmative action to tax policy, it was all socialism, socialism, socialism. As historian Kevin Kruse pointed out, they even deployed it against the distribution of the polio vaccine (sound familiar?) and the interstate highway system. Even up through the 1990s you had presidential candidates like Bob Dole of Kansas proclaiming that “public housing is one of the last bastions of socialism in the world.”
This was all nonsense. The Democratic Party was not socialist and neither were its members. There are a few who call themselves Democratic socialists, which in America is really social liberalism or what we think of as progressivism. (Political labels get weedy very quickly.) But that has never stopped the Republicans from complaining that Democratic policies are socialistic.
For instance, just last year when the Democrats were hammering out the details of President Biden’s Build Back Better bill, the GOP caterwauled constantly about it. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham wailed that it was “paving a path to socialism” while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) whined: “The American people didn’t vote for a massive socialist transformation.” This guy couldn’t shut up about it:
Suffice to say that the old cudgel is still in use.
A recent Pew Poll surveyed Americans’ views on the subject:
Today, 36% of U.S. adults say they view socialism somewhat (30%) or very (6%) positively, down from 42% who viewed the term positively in May 2019. Six-in-ten today say they view socialism negatively, including one-third who view it very negatively.
And while a majority of the public (57%) continues to view capitalism favorably, that is 8 percentage points lower than in 2019 (65%), according to a national survey from Pew Research Center conducted Aug. 1-14 among 7,647 adults.
Much of the decline in positive views of both socialism and capitalism has been driven by shifts in views among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.
Republicans’ views haven’t changed. They are against socialism and they love capitalism. In theory anyway:
But for all this ongoing talk about socialism over the years, they had more or less stopped hurling the “Commie” tag at their political adversaries. After all, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and China’s entry into the capitalist marketplace it sounds weird. Whatever the erstwhile threat of Communism it certainly doesn’t make much sense in 2023.
And yet it’s suddenly become commonplace. You have GOP Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene appearing at White Nationalist conventions referring to the “Democrats, who are the Communist Party of the United States of America.” South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wrote an oped in which she said, “the idea that Georgia, of all places, could elect two communists to the United States Senate was ridiculous.”
And there’s Trump, of course, who told his ecstatic followers at a rally in Ohio in 2020:
“The choice in November is going to be very simple. There’s never been a time when there’s been such a difference. One is probably communism. I don’t know. They keep saying socialism. I think they’ve gone over that one. That one’s passed already.”
The Guardian’s Richard Seymour called this “anti-communism-without-communism” writing:
[E]verything that is perceived as threatening can be compressed into a single, treasonous, diabolical enemy: just different tentacles of the same communist kraken. Rather like a racial stereotype, “communism” figuratively represents systemic crises as something external, a demonic plot.
Trump is a baby boomer who grew up during a time when calling anyone you disagree with a Commie was common on the right so it’s not surprising he would see the utility of using it as a convenient “demonic plot.” So naturally he’s taking it to new levels during this campaign by proclaiming that we are in “the final battle” as he promises to cast out the communists, marxists and fascists” and liberate America from these “villains.” If they are predicting Armageddon the socialist devil is just a little bit too fey to be truly menacing.
But there are more practical, prosaic reasons for this escalation in Commie cat-calling. The most obvious is that older voters tend to vote Republican and they have a visceral reaction to the “C” word. They react with reflexive hostility and are the most likely to think such a preposterous claim makes sense. The constant references to the “Chinese Communist Party” as the great enemy also hits home with those people. And there is some evidence that Republicans have made some inroads with certain Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups who are deeply hostile to the communist regimes from which they emigrated.
But Trump has a special reason for hitting that note right now. He’s facing a trial in Florida and the speech he gave on the evening of his arraignment made clear who the enemy is:
“If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me. They will not hesitate to ramp up their persecution of Christians, pro-life activists, parents attending school board meetings, and even future Republican candidates. I am the only one that can save this nation.”
He is speaking directly to potential jurors in Florida proclaiming that his indictment is the result of a communist conspiracy. According to Politico, “Harvard professor Steven Levitsky argues, for many Americans, Trump’s anti-communist rhetoric “just sounds silly… But (for) people who are either descendants of Cuban exiles or actual Venezuelan exiles — that actually struck some chord.”
Silly isn’t the word I’d use but it will suffice. I’d expect to hear a whole lot more Commie talk before this is through.
Salon
Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker advised Northwestern University graduates this month to pursue kindness. Our more primitive impulses demand we be suspicious of the unfamiliar, including people unlike ourselves. It’s an evolutionary survival instinct.
To be kind, Pritzker says, “we have to shut down that animal insinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges.”
The alternative approach taken by some of our neighbors is to embrace “weaponized cruelty” (as in Adam Serwer’s famous coinage).
“I’m here to tell you,” Pritzker continues, “that when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty they have failed the first test of an advanced society.”
Moreover (and this is not Pritzker), what paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey theorized is that compassion carries a more an advanced survival advantage that turned primitive Man into modern Man:
Bipedalism carried with it an enormous price, where compassion was what you paid your ticket with. You simply can’t abandon somebody who’s incapacitated because the rest will abandon you next time it comes to be your turn.
As I wrote, pre-Trump, “In fact, it would seem that a movement that sneers at being your brother’s keeper in organizing human society is hardly an accomplishment, cultural, political, or evolutionary.”
Kindness, Pritzker adds, is a mark of creativity and problem-solving ability. He punctuates that observation with another.
“Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true, the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”
What is it like to have to scan every room for people for whom empathy and compassion are highly selective, people who may consider you prey? George Hahn can tell you.
