Pointy-headed intellectuals in their ivory towers oppose Uhmurica! These librul college professors oppose mandating even one course in U.S. history for graduating from the UNC system, alleges Fox’s Pete Hegseth. Never mind that a high school course in United States history is a prerequisite for admission to the system’s colleges.
“They think learning about America is, and this is their words, ‘indoctrination’, ” Hegseth tells viewers his network indoctrinates 24-7-365.
I’m having trouble even finding indoctrination among “their words.” You’re not surprised, I know. And even less surprised that Fox does not find room for a link to the actual letter in its four-paragraph story.
We, the undersigned UNC-Chapel Hill faculty, are alarmed by the interference and overreach of the North Carolina legislature, the UNC System Board of Governors, and the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees whose actions violate the principles of academic freedom and shared governance that undergird higher education in N.C. and the U.S. If enacted, we believe that these measures will further damage the reputation of UNC and the state of North Carolina and will likely bring critical scrutiny from accrediting agencies that know undue interference in university affairs when they see it. Among the disturbing recent developments:
House Bill 715. This bill, called the Higher Ed. Modernization & Affordability Act, will“prospectively eliminate academic tenure and establish (a) uniform contracting procedure for faculty at constituent institutions and community colleges.” Contract terms will range from one to four years; the new law would go into effect on July 1, 2024. The bill grants the BOT the power to “[e]nsure efficient use of institutional resources, including regularly evaluating and eliminating unnecessary or redundant expenses, personnel, and areas of study.”
House Bill 96. If passed, it will create a new American history/government graduation requirement for all students of public colleges and universities in the state. In its current form, the bill would prescribe what is taught in this course and even determine much of the content and weight of its final exam. H.B. 96 violates core principles of academic freedom. It substitutes ideological force-feeding for the intellectual expertise of faculty.
The Board of Governors’ ongoing assault on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at UNC schools. The Board presumes to dictate what words are acceptable in any discussions with prospective students, employees, or incoming faculty. Led by people apparently opposed to equity and made uncomfortable by the concept of inclusion, these anti-DEI efforts violate the First Amendment and interfere with the unfettered pursuit of truth and enlightenment.
The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees’ proposed School of Civic Life and Leadership. This initiative, reflecting BOT members’ proclaimed desire for greater partisan balance among the professoriate, came from BOT members rather than faculty, and it comes with $4 million in state funding amid financial austerity elsewhere at UNC. It constitutes a clear violation of the established principle that faculty, not politicians, are responsible for a college’s curriculum.
Unfortunately, these threats are familiar. In 2022, the national American Association of University Professors did a thorough investigation of the problems of shared governance, academic freedom, and institutional racism at UNC since 2010, concluding that UNC needs leadership that “respects faculty expertise, that observes widely accepted principles of academic governance, that protects academic inquiry from political pressures and constraints, and that is willing to do more than simply pay lip service to the idea of equity.”
Instead of heeding this warning, our leaders continue to disregard campus autonomy, attack the expertise and independence of world-class faculty, and seek to force students’ educations into pre-approved ideological containers. We must protect the principles of academic freedom and shared governance which have long made UNC a leader in public education.
–Jay M. Smith, Professor of History
Maxine Eichner, Professor of Law
The GOP-controlled NC state legislature proposes to set the course of study for this required history that degreed professionals will teach, as well as how much weight the final exam will have on students’ final grade.
How many behind this bill have degrees in history or education?
Let’s see, sponsors include Rep. Keith Kidwell who knows something vaguely about business management and whose name appears on the Oath Keeper’s roster. Majority Whip Rep. John Hardister has a B.A. in Political Science and worked in marketing for his family’s mortgage firm. And Rep. Ray Pickett who seems to have no higher education and can barely manage a web or Facebook page; he’s the primary sponsor. Where’d he get his expertise in American History? They all propose to dictate to tenured faculty at a world-recognised university system what they should teach.
The Indutrial Revolution and globalization were child’s play
Danielle Allen was still at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study in 2008 when she raised red flags about anonymous viral emails attacking then-presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.
“I started thinking, ‘How does one stop it?’ ” Allen told the Washington Post:
Allen set her sights on dissecting the modern version of a whisper campaign, even though experts told her it would be impossible to trace the chain e-mail to its origin. Along the way, even as her hunt grew cold, she gained valuable insight into the way political information circulates, mutates and sometimes devastates in the digital age.
Now at Harvard, Allen is still warning about digital mayhem. Only now, her concern extends to “generative artificial intelligence, a tool that will help bad actors further accelerate the spread of misinformation.”
She’s signed onto an open letter with technologists, academics, and others calling for a six-month pause in “the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”
Email spam was bad enough. A.I.-generated disinformation could be worse, with “all kinds of unpredictable emergent properties and powers” spawned by the technology. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates disagrees that we’re there yet, but Allen’s research suggests that the latest machine-learning models show “sparks” of artificial general intelligence. Microsoft Research teams concur (Washington Post):
But regardless of which side of the debate one comes down on, and whether the time has indeed come (as I think it has) to figure out how to regulate an intelligence that functions in ways we cannot predict, it is also the case that the near-term benefits and potential harms of this breakthrough are already clear, and attention must be paid. Numerous human activities — including many white-collar jobs — can now be automated. We used to worry about the impacts of AI on truck drivers; now it’s also the effects on lawyers, coders and anyone who depends on intellectual property for their livelihood. This advance will increase productivity but also supercharge dislocation.
The Industrial Revolution was just a foretaste. People relocated en masse from farms to factory jobs in cities. We are still living with the social, economic, and political fallout from automation, globalization, and vaporware promises of how there would be, in the end, more winners than losers. MAGA, anyone?
Allen offers a breathless selection of potential misuses of OpenAI that the technology recognizes and prohibits:
Illegal activity. Child sexual-abuse material. Generation of hateful, harassing or violent content. Generation of malware. Activity that has high risk of physical harm, including: weapons development; military and warfare; management or operation of critical infrastructure in energy, transportation and water; content that promotes, encourages or depicts acts of self-harm. Activity that has a high risk of economic harm, including: multilevel marketing, gambling, payday lending, automated determinations of eligibility for credit, employment, educational institutions or public assistance services. Fraudulent or deceptive activity, including: scams, coordinated inauthentic behavior, plagiarism, astroturfing, disinformation, pseudo-pharmaceuticals. Adult content. Political campaigning or lobbying by generating high volumes of campaign materials. Activities that violate privacy. Unauthorized practice of law or medicine or provision of financial advice.
Allen and other signatories on the letter are not Luddites. But they pose a classic question underlying gothic horror and science fiction and dating back to Mary Shelley: just because we can invent a new technology does not mean we should. At the very least, not without first planning to head off the fallout. They write:
Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system’s potential effects. OpenAI’s recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that “At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.” We agree. That point is now.
“What’s the hurry?” Allen asks in the Post:
We are simply ill-prepared for the impact of yet another massive social transformation. We should avoid rushing into all of this with only a few engineers at a small number of labs setting the direction for all of humanity. We need a breather for some collective learning about what humanity has created, how to govern it, and how to ensure that there will be accountability for the creation and use of new tools.
There are already many things we can and should do. We should be making scaled-up public-sector investments into third-party auditing, so we can actually know what models are capable of and what data they’re ingesting. We need to accelerate a standards-setting process that builds on work by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. We must investigate and pursue “compute governance,” which means regulation of the use of the massive amounts of energy necessary for the computing power that drives the new models. This would be akin to regulating access to uranium for the production of nuclear technologies.
More than that, we need to strengthen the tools of democracy itself. A pause in further training of generative AI could give our democracy the chance both to govern technology and to experiment with using some of these new tools to improve governance. The Commerce Department recently solicited input on potential regulation for the new AI models; what if we used some of the tools the AI field is generating to make that public comment process even more robust and meaningful?
I’ve literally watched this movie before, time and time again. As have you.
I traded notes with Allen in 2008 about my growing collection of right-wing spam. I speculated at the time that there might be a boiler room somewhere generating chain emails. After social media spread disinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign, we found out there was one: in St. Petersburg.
“What I’ve come to realize is, the labor of generating an e-mail smear is divided and distributed amongst parties whose identities are secret even to each other,” she says. A first group of people published articles that created the basis for the attack. A second group recirculated the claims from those articles without ever having been asked to do so. “No one coordinates the roles,” Allen said. Instead the participants swim toward their goal like a school of fish — moving on their own, but also in unison.
Now we face the prospect of A.I. destabilizing society, swimming in unison, untouched by human hands.
With luck, maybe climate change will take out humanity first.
It should be obvious to anyone following my weekly scribbles at Hullabaloo (great googly moogly…have I been doing this for 17 years?!) that I primarily write about film. I love writing about film. But my first love (we never forget our first love) was music. My first published piece ever was a review of King Crimson’s A Lark’s Tongue in Aspic, in 1973. Granted, it was for my high school newspaper and upwards of dozens read it, but for that brief shining moment…I was Lester Bangs (in my mind). Now that I think about it…Digby was the editor of that paper (that’s how we originally became friends-Journalism class in our senior year).
That was 50 years ago. And Digby’s still my editor. I don’t understand what’s happening.
And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking Racing around to come up behind you again The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Oh. Thanks for clearing that up.
Speaking of 50-year anniversaries-1973 was an outstanding year for music. Distilling a “top 10” was crazy making (if I hadn’t allowed myself the “next 10” at the bottom , my head would have exploded). If I have “overlooked” one of your favorites…it’s duly noted. In alphabetical order:
Alladin Sane-David Bowie
How does one follow a stone classic like Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars? Just a walk in the park for David Bowie…swinging an old bouquet. A very strong set, bolstered by Mick Ronson’s distinctive guitar pyrotechnics and some of pianist Mike Garson’s finest work (particularly on the more ethereal numbers like “Lady Grinning Soul” and the title cut). While Bowie’s so-called “Berlin period” was still several years down the road, there is a Weimar cabaret energy to the self-reflective “Time”, which is one of the album’s showstoppers.
Choice cuts: “The Jean Genie”, “Time”, “Panic in Detroit”, “Alladin Sane”, “Lady Grinning Soul”, “Cracked Actor”.
Catch a Fire-Bob Marley and the Wailers
While this was their fifth studio effort, Catch a Fire (their debut on Chris Blackwell’s Island Records) arguably marked the first awareness of Bob Marley and the Wailers for many music fans in the U.S. (they were already well-known in Jamaica and gaining popularity in the U.K.). The original sessions were recorded in Kingston in 1972; Blackwell remixed the 8-track masters and had session players add clavinet and additional guitar parts to several tracks. The songs are some of the best in their catalog. It’s a true group effort, with Peter Tosh taking lead vocals on the two songs he composed – “400 Years” and “Stop That Train”. If you haven’t heard them, I recommend seeking out the original mixes, which I think are more compelling.
Choice cuts: “Concrete Jungle”, “Kinky Reggae”, “Stop That Train”, “Slave Driver”, “400 Years”, “Stir it Up”.
Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd
Talk about a shoo-in (I’d probably have to hire a 24-hour security detail if I failed to include this one). The now-iconic prism design that adorns the album’s cover is apt; there is something elemental about this set that (obviously) captured the imaginations of millions of listeners (to date, the album has sold over 45 million copies). Pink Floyd may not have invented prog-rock, but they unarguably raised the bar for the genre with this entry.
Choice cuts: All of them?
Montrose-Montrose
Clocking in at just over 30 minutes, this self-titled debut comes in like a lion and goes out like…a lion. Led by guitarist extraordinaire Ronnie Montrose (formerly of the Edgar Winter Group), the hard-rocking quartet was propelled by a tight rhythm section (Denny Carmassi on drums and Bill Church on bass) and a young up-and-coming lead vocalist named Sammy Hagar. The album benefits from dynamic production by Ted Templeman, who also worked with Van Halen, the Doobie Brothers, and Van Morrison (prior to forming Montrose, Ronnie Montrose played on Morrison’s Tupelo Honey album, and the songs “Listen to the Lion” and “St. Dominic’s Preview”).
I had the pleasure of seeing Ronnie Montrose perform twice; circa 1981 in San Francisco with Gamma, and 2011 in Seattle. Sadly, in 2012, he took his own life. He had beat prostate cancer but battled chronic depression. That last time I saw him perform, he was in an ebullient mood; graciously chatting with fans afterwards and clearly having a great time rocking some classics from the first album (with a young vocalist who sounded uncannily like Sammy Hagar). He was an astonishing player and an inspiration to me as a guitarist.
Choice cuts: “Rock the Nation”, “Bad Motor Scooter”, “Space Station #5”, “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, “Rock Candy”, “Make it Last”.
The New York Dolls– The New York Dolls
In a new Showtime documentary about former New York Dolls lead singer David Johansen by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi called Personality Crisis: One Night Only (recommended!), Dolls super-fan Morrissey observes, “They only made two studio albums; and for a group that did so little really, and existed for such a short amount of time, their impact has been extraordinary. And the music, because it was such fantastic pop music, it just seemed to me like the absolute answer to everything. Which of course…too dangerous.”
What did he mean by “too dangerous”? For one, the Dolls were a bit too much, too soon for many rock music fans, likely befuddled by the band’s Frankenstein construct of fey posturing, campy attire, New Yawk attitude, and garage band sound. To be sure, Bolan and Bowie had already injected androgyny into the zeitgeist, but the Dolls were still pretty over the top for 1973. In hindsight, their descendants are legion, ranging from The Ramones to Måneskin.
Musically, they were pop-punk before “punk” was a known quantity. Their eponymous debut album (produced by Todd Rundgren) has held up remarkably well; songs that, while rooted in R&B, 50s rock, and 60s pop, are most decidedly not your father’s R&B, 50s rock and 60s pop.
Choice cuts: “Personality Crisis”, “Looking for a Kiss”, “Lonely Planet Boy”, “Trash”, “Bad Girl”, “Private World”, “Jet Boy”.
Quadrophenia-The Who
Never content to rest on his laurels, Peter Townshend set out to compose yet another rock opera in 1973-and pulled it off with this epic double album, the Who’s follow-up to the excellent Who’s Next (which itself rose from the ashes of a fizzled Tommy-like project called Lifehouse). A musical love letter to the band’s first g-g-generation of rabid British fans (aka the “Mods”), Quadrophenia gets inside the head of Mod Jimmy (embodied by Roger Daltrey’s powerful and emotive vocals). Lavishly produced, with all band members in fine form. The album spawned a 1979 film version directed by Franc Roddam, with a Who soundtrack.
Choice cuts: “The Real Me”, “Cut My Hair”, “The Punk and the Godfather”, “I’m One”, “I’ve Had Enough”, “5:15”, “Bell-Boy”, “Dr. Jimmy”, “Love, Reign o’er Me”.
Suzi Quatro-Suzi Quatro
Detroit native Suzi Quatro didn’t consciously set out to be the groundbreaking and influential artist that she turned out to be. She just wanted to rock…and “rock” she does on this high-energy debut album. Music was in her blood…her first gig was playing bongos in her dad’s jazz band at age 8. She formed her first band at 15, an all-female outfit (eventually called Cradle) that included her three sisters. British producer Mickie Most happened to catch a performance and instantly saw her star potential, helping Suzi sign with a UK label. Not unlike the New York Dolls, her influence was ultimately more impactful than her albums (she is most famously lauded by Joan Jett as her chief inspiration). This album still sounds fresh and fun, chockablock with straight-ahead rockers and catchy power-pop (many written by Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who also composed a number of songs for The Sweet).
Choice cuts: “48 Crash”, “Glycerine Queen”, “Can the Can”, “Shine My Machine”, “Primitive Love”. “I Wanna Be Your Man”.
Solid Air-John Martyn
A near-masterpiece of (mostly) acoustic guitar-based jazz-folk by a gifted singer-songwriter. Martyn is accompanied by bassist Danny Thompson (formerly of Pentangle). I had a chance to see the late Scottish musician perform at a now-defunct club called The Backstage in Seattle back in the mid-90s. It was just Martyn and a stand-up bass player; Martyn primarily accompanied himself on acoustic, but played a Les Paul through a delay unit on several tunes. A minimal setup, but it was easily the best live performance I have ever seen by any solo artist or band. Not only was Martyn’s playing and singing superlative, but he was an absolute riot in between songs (he had a lot of Scottish jokes). Quite an experience-like this album.
Choice cuts: “Solid Air”, “Over the Hill”, “May You Never”, “Don’t Wanna Know”.
Spectrum-Billy Cobham
In the wake of Miles Davis’ groundbreaking 1970s album Bitches Brew, a new musical sub-genre emerged. “Fusion” (as it came to be labeled) had one foot in rock and the other in jazz. The Bitches Brew roster is legend: including future members of Weather Report (Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul), Return to Forever (Chick Corea, Lenny White) and The Mahavishnu Orchestra (John McLaughlin and Billy Cobham). Drummer Billy Cobham’s first solo project turned out to be influential in its own right (most famously cited by Jeff Beck as the chief catalyst for his lauded 1975 release Blow by Blow). Cobham recruited some heavyweight players for Spectrum, including guitarist Tommy Bolin, fellow Mahavishnu Orchestra alum Jan Hammer on keys, and veteran session bassist Leland Sklar. Crisp production by Ken Scott.
Choice cuts: “Quadrant 4”, “Stratus”, “To the Women in My Life”.
Twice Removed From Yesterday-Robin Trower
After a 4-year stint with Procol Harum (1967-1971), guitarist Robin Trower left so that he could fully realize the expansive soundscapes he hinted at in the ethereal “Song For a Dreamer”, which appeared the final album he did with the band, Broken Barricades. Recruiting bassist/vocalist James DeWar and drummer Reg Isadore, he released this compelling set in 1973. Unfairly dismissed by some as a Hendrix clone, Trower not only developed a distinctive texture and tone, but has proven himself as one of the greatest players ever (well, in my book). Granted, the album does feature Hendrix-ish riff-driven numbers, but evenly balances the mix with beautiful, transporting ballads, carried along by DeWar’s sublime, whiskey-soaked vocals. One of those albums I still listen to on a regular basis.
Choice cuts: “I Can’t Wait Much Longer”, “Daydream”, “Hannah”, “I Can’t Stand It”, “Twice Removed from Yesterday”.
Bonus Tracks!
Here are 10 more gems from 1973 worth a spin:
3+3-The Isley Brothers
Abandoned Luncheonette-Hall & Oates
Band on the Run-Paul McCartney & Wings
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road-Elton John
Houses of the Holy-Led Zeppelin
Lark’s Tongue in Aspic-King Crimson
Mott-Mott the Hoople
Raw Power-The Stooges
Selling England by the Pound-Genesis
Witness-Spooky Tooth
Remember-it’s only rock ‘n’ roll. Now get on your bad motor scooter and RIDE!
Ron DeSnowflake didn’t make much of an impression overseas I’m afraid. But why would he? He’s just the latest great whitebread hope of the GOP with a personality that’s as flat as a pancake:
He hopes to win the hearts and minds of devoted Donald Trump supporters ahead of next year’s U.S. election.
But Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis failed to impress British business chiefs at a high-profile London event Friday, in a tired performance described variously as “horrendous,” “low-wattage” and “like the end of an overseas trip.”
The Florida governor, expected to launch his bid next month to challenge Trump as the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential race, met with more than 50 representatives of major U.K. firms and business lobbying groups as a part of a four-country “trade mission” ending in London Friday.
His trip was officially billed as an attempt to build Florida’s economic relationships with the U.K., Israel, South Korea and Japan, but it has been widely seen in Washington as a chance for DeSantis to present himself as a statesman on the world stage.
For several of those present, however, the statesmanship was lacking.
One U.K. business figure said DeSantis “looked bored” and “stared at his feet” as he met with titans of British industry in an event co-hosted by Lloyd’s of London — the world’s largest insurance marketplace.
“He had been to five different countries in five days and he definitely looked spent, but his message wasn’t presidential,” they told POLITICO. “He was horrendous.”
A second business figure who was in the room said it was a “low-wattage” performance and that “nobody in the room was left thinking, ‘this man’s going places’.”
They said: “It felt really a bit like we were watching a state-level politician. I wouldn’t be surprised if [people in attendance] came out thinking ‘that’s not the guy’.”
Republican Party officials plan to keep private an internal “autopsy” report assessing why many of their candidates fell short in the 2022 midterm elections, two people familiar with the party’s thinking on the matter told NBC News on Friday.
In late November, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announced that the party would conduct a post-election review of the GOP’s disappointing performance in a cycle that should have favored Republicans.
A panel created by the Republican National Committee has completed a draft of the introduction of the report, but in a break from past practice, it’s not likely to be widely available.
“I believe that the post-election analysis is meant to be for internal use only; taking the lessons we’ve learned so we can improve,” one RNC member said. “I don’t think it will be made publicly available.”
After the 2012 presidential election, the RNC commissioned a frank review of the party’s shortcomings at the ballot box and publicly released recommendations for the future. The resulting 100-page report, titled the “Growth & Opportunity Project,” provided an unsparing look at the party’s struggle to win over voters and communicate a winning message.
Many of the suggestions were brushed aside by the party’s next standard-bearer, Donald Trump, who went on to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. After his defeat in 2020, Trump played an outsize role in the midterms elections two years later, vetting Republican candidates and endorsing those who championed his agenda.
Yet the draft introduction of the report doesn’t mention his name, nor that of any candidates, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Of course it doesn’t. He is Dear Leader. I doubt this report is meaningful in any case. They are not in a place to be honest about what they’ve done to themselves.
The party is at war with itself so I expect this will leak before long. I wouldn’t expect much.
Kyrsten Sinema is interviewed by McCay Coppins and makes a very poor impression. The woman has a shockingly unpleasant personality:
Sinema tells me that there are several popular narratives about her in the media, all of them “inaccurate.” One is that she’s “mysterious,” “mercurial,” “an enigma”—that she makes her decisions on unknowable whims. She regards this portrayal as “fairly absurd”: “I think I’m a highly predictable person.”
“Then,” she goes on, “there’s the She’s just doing what’s best for her and not for her state or for her country” narrative. “And I think that’s a strange narrative, particularly when you contrast it with”—here she pauses, and then smirks—“ya know, the facts.”
You can see, in moments like these, why she bothers people. She speaks in a matter-of-fact staccato, her tone set frequently to smug. She says things like “I am a long-term thinker in a short-term town” and “I prefer to be successful.” The overall effect, if you’re not charmed by it (and a lot of her Republican colleagues are), is condescension bordering on arrogance. Sinema, who graduated from high school at 16 and college at 18, carries herself like she is unquestionably the smartest person in the room.
No one would mistake her for being dumb, though. In the past two years, Sinema has been at the center of virtually every major piece of bipartisan legislation passed by the Senate, negotiating deals on infrastructure, guns, and a bill that codifies the right to same-sex marriage. She has also become a villain to the left, proudly standing in the way of Democrats’ more ambitious agenda by refusing to eliminate the filibuster. The tension culminated with her announcement in December that she was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.
Sinema hasn’t given many in-depth interviews since then, but she says she agreed to meet with me because she wants to show that what she’s doing “works.” She thinks that, unfashionable though it may be, her approach to legislating—compromise, centrism, bipartisan consensus-building—is the only way to get anything done in Washington. I was interested in a separate, but related, question: What exactly is she trying to get done? Much of the discussion around Sinema has focused on the puzzle of what she really believes. What does Kyrsten Sinema want?What Does Kyrsten Sinema stand for? The subtext in these headlines is that if you dig deep enough, a secret belief system will be revealed. Is she a progressive opportunistically cosplaying as a centrist? A conservative finally showing her true colors? The truth, according to Sinema herself, is that there is no ideological core to discover.
She believes in nothing, that’s clear. She’s an empty vessel filled with gaseous self-regard.
I learn this when I describe for Sinema the story I hear most often about her: that she started out as an idealistic progressive activist—organizing protests against the Iraq War, marching for undocumented immigrants in 100-degree heat, leading the effort to defeat a gay-marriage ban in Arizona—but that gradually she sold out her youthful idealism and morphed into a Washington moderate who pals around with Republicans and protects tax breaks for hedge-fund managers.
To my surprise, Sinema doesn’t really push back on this one. For one thing, she tells me, she’s proud that she outgrew the activism of her youth. It was, in her own assessment, “a spectacular failure.”
I ask her to elaborate.
“Well,” she says, with a derisive shrug. “You can make a poster and stand out on the street, but at the end of the day all you have is a sunburn. You didn’t move the needle. You didn’t make a difference … I set about real quick saying, ‘This doesn’t work.’”
Still no word on what it is that she wants to work. Who knows? She just wants to build some kind of compromise around anything and call it success. The end result is clearly not of interest to her.
She’s just a facilitator for others apparently. Maybe she should become a mediator instead of a politician.
[…]
She doesn’t like civil disobedience, thinks it drives more people away than it attracts. More to the point, Sinema contends, the activists who spend their time noisily berating her in person and online aren’t doing much for the causes they purport to care about. “I am much happier showing a two-year record of incredible achievements that are literally making a difference in people’s lives than sharing my thoughts on Twitter.” She punctuates these last words with the sort of contempt that only someone who’s tweeted more than 17,000 times can feel.
Her contempt for other people just drips off of her. You can almost feel Coppins’ recoil from her.
She tells him that her “evolution” from left wing firebrand to centrist tool is a result of age and maturity and contends that politicians should be allowed to change their minds. True. But it would be helpful to know why they did it. To her it’s all about being “successful” and it doesn’t matter what the substance of her “success” is. She admits it:
“I never think about where [my position] is on the political spectrum, because I don’t care,” she tells me. “People will say, ‘Oh, we don’t know what her position is.’ Well, I may not have one yet. And I know that’s weird in this town, but I actually want to do all of the research, get as much knowledge as possible, spend all of the time doing the work before I make a decision.”
I ask her if there’s any ideological through line at all that explains the various votes she’s taken in the Senate. She thinks about it before answering, “No.”
The article goes on to discuss her role in getting the gun safety legislation through last year. She seems to think that was an earth shattering accomplishment when it was really just a very tiny step toward sanity. She deserves whatever credit they attribute to her for getting it done but it wasn’t exactly the civil rights act.
Patient, painful bipartisan dealmaking, she tells me, is “the only approach that works. Because the other approaches make a lot of noise but don’t get anything done.”
I ask her what other approaches she’s thinking of.
“I don’t know,” Sinema says with a shrug. “Yelling?”
Members of her former party would argue that there was another option for enacting their policy vision—eliminating the filibuster, which requires 60 votes for most legislation in the Senate, to start passing bills with simple majorities—but Sinema ensured that was impossible. She makes no apologies for voting to preserve the filibuster last year. In fact, she tells me, she would reinstate it for judicial nominees. She believes that the Democrats who want to be able to pass sweeping legislation with narrow majorities have forgotten that one day Republicans will be in control again. “When people are in power, they think they’ll never lose power.”
Right. But when they come to power they won’t repeal any of her successes because … well, I don’t know why. Why are her “successes” so much more durable? Because they’re bipartisan? So what, they weren’t passed with 40 Republicans. It was just a handful and they are all considered RINOs by the voters.
One might look at what’s happened with Obamacare as the best evidence that what she is saying is total bullshit. Give the people what they need and it’s not going to be easy to take it back.
Before departing her hideaway, I return to Sinema’s central argument—that her approach “works.” It’s hard to evaluate objectively. What to make of a senator who leaves her party, professes to have no ideological agenda, and yet manages to wield outsize influence in writing the laws of the nation? Some might look at her record and see a hollow careerism that prizes bipartisanship for its own sake. Others might argue that in highly polarized times, politicians like her are necessary to grease the gears of a dysfunctional government.
One thing is clear, though: If Sinema wants to persuade other political leaders to take the same path she has taken, she’ll need to demonstrate that it’s electorally viable. So far, the polls in Arizona suggest she would struggle to get reelected as an independent in 2024; she already has challengers on the right and the left. A survey earlier this year found that she was among the most unpopular senators in the country.
Sinema tells me she hasn’t decided yet whether she’ll seek reelection, but she talks like someone who’s not planning on it. She’s only 46 years old; she has other interests. “I’m not only a senator,” she tells me. “I’m also lots of other things.” I ask if she worries about what lessons will be drawn in Washington if her independent turn leads to the end of her political career.
She pauses and answers with a smirk: “I don’t worry about hypotheticals.”
I had always thought that she had her eye on the White House and that political power was her main ambition. Now I’m not so sure. This interviews shows that she really doesn’t give a shit about anything so maybe she really is just setting herself up for a big corporate job or some kind of entrepreneurial project to make a lot of money. She does like the good life. And it’s quite clear that she thinks people who actually believe in things are stupid so why bother with all this parochial politicking? She’s so much better than that.
“Just two ounces is equivalent to three joints” — the Republican arguments against legal cannabis are going well. #mnleg
I don’t know how to explain to you that other states have legal cannabis and are doing fine
pour one out for all the victims of cannabis overdoses. RIP
"How I almost wrecked my life" — anti-cannabis Minnesota Republican says he used weed in college and it made him lazy and hurt his grades. I guess this is his reason to keep it illegal.
the same Republican who is against weed because it made him lazy talks about getting a DUI during the same speech
Jamelle Bouie’s newsletter makes an important observation about the state of our democracy. As I watched what they did to that brave transwoman in Montana fighting for her right to …well, exist it just shocks me how cruel these people are. It’s the same look on those people’s faces as those above. It’s an ugly, ugly display. And as Bouie explains, it’s a threat to all of us, our democracy in general, as they use whatever power they have to silence dissent:
On Tuesday, I wrote about the Republican effort to limit the reach and scope of initiatives and referendums as another instance of the party’s war on majority rule. One thing I wanted to include, but couldn’t quite integrate into the structure of the column, was a point about the recent use of legislative expulsion to punish Democratic lawmakers who dissent from or challenge Republican majorities.
We saw this in Tennessee, obviously, where Republicans expelled two Democratic members — Representatives Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin J. Pearson of Memphis — for loudly supporting a youth protest for gun control from the statehouse floor using a bullhorn.
We saw another example this week, in Montana, after State Representative Zooey Zephyr, a transgender woman, spoke out against a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors. Calling her comments (“If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.”) “disrespectful and “inappropriate,” Montana Republicans have barred Zephyr from attending — or speaking during — the House session for the rest of the legislative term, which ends next week.
In Nebraska, a Democratic lawmaker is being investigated by an ethics panel for a conflict of interest regarding her filibuster of another bill to ban gender-affirming health care for minors. The conflict? She has a transgender child.
And if we look back to last year, we’ll recall that House Republicans censured former Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their roles in investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
What to make of this?
Expelling or censuring members isn’t necessarily an attack on majority rule or popular government, and yet it feels more sinister, in a way, than an impenetrable partisan gerrymander or even a strict voter ID law. I think that’s because these moves against dissenting members constitute an attack on representation itself.
No one forced Tennessee Republicans to expel Representatives Jones and Pearson. They could have ignored them. But they were so incensed by the show of opposition that they deprived about 130,000 people of their representation in the legislature. Silencing and effectively banning Representative Zephyr means that about 10,000 people in Montana’s 100th District don’t have a voice in the legislature.
The foundation of modern American democracy is that all Americans deserve some kind of representation in the rooms where law and policy are made. Not content to control those rooms in states where they dominate the political scene, some Republicans have said, in essence, that representation is a privilege for communities whose chosen lawmakers don’t offend their sensibilities.
The Constitution guarantees to each state a “republican form of government.” I’ve written before about how this “republican form” is mostly undefined; neither the framers nor the courts have really said what it means for a state to have one. But I think we can at least say that when legislatures are stripping communities of representation over dissent and disagreement, it doesn’t exist.
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My Tuesday column was, as I mentioned, on the Republican attack on referendums and initiatives, and how the party has committed itself to circumventing the will of the majority wherever it thinks it’s necessary.
There’s still room for innovation, however, and in the past year Republicans have opened new fronts in the war for minority rule. One element in these campaigns, an aggressive battle to limit the reach of the referendum process, stands out in particular. Wherever possible, Republicans hope to raise the threshold for winning a ballot initiative from a majority to a supermajority or — where such a threshold already exists — add other hurdles to passage.
The American right has always been in tension with democracy. It is authoritarian at heart. In fact, it’s paeans to “freedom” have always been fatuous — freedom for me but not for thee. As long as they could persuade enough people to go along they were happy to pretend they believe in democracy. The minute the people object they change the rules.
More than half of registered voters believe political attacks on transgender children and families are a “major problem,” according to a Fox News poll.
The poll found that 57 percent of respondents said the attacks are a major problem, while 26 percent said they are a minor problem. Only 15 percent said they were not a problem, while 3 percent said they were unsure.
What’s the world coming to when you can’t go to a CONVENIENCE STORE without getting shot?
You know, we’re getting really good at this. Anyone have a friend at the IOC? If shooting people was an official event, American competitors would sweep all the medals. Those who survive.
Obviously, this kid isn’t ready for the U.S. trials:
An Illinois man using a leaf blower in his yard was killed by his neighbor, local television reported.
William Martys, 59, was reportedly using his leaf blower in his yard in Antioch when his neighbor, 79-year-old Ettore Lacchei, got into an argument with him then shot him in the head.
Lacchei was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
A neighbor told WLS, Chicago’s ABC affiliate, the two men had a history, and Lacchei had pulled a gun on Martys before.
“No one deserves anything like that, and it’s just kind of crazy to think someone can just break like that over just a simple argument that can be fixed just talking,” the neighbor, JR McCarty, told the station.
A man killed five people, including an 8-year-old boy, with an AR-15-style weapon Friday night in an angry response to his neighbors’ request that he stop shooting in his yard while their baby was trying to sleep, according to Texas authorities.
Instead of heeding his neighbors’ request, the man allegedly took the gun, went to their house and killed half the people inside. He then fled, sparking an overnight manhunt around Cleveland, Tex., that continued through Saturday afternoon.
