E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Democrats aren’t as obsessed with Trump as you think:
Democrats, it’s often said, are so obsessed with President Trump and the Russia scandal that they talk of nothing else. But anyone who spent Tuesday listening to a regiment of potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidates present their case at the liberal Center for American Progress’s Ideas Conference can testify that this is simply untrue.
Attacks on Trump were far less prominent than promises related to economic justice and warnings about the ways in which the United States is falling behind other parts of the world. When Trump did come under fire, it was usually on health care, his lopsided tax cut for corporations, or administration corruption outside the context of the Russia inquiry.
If you want to argue that the Holy Grail of “a persuasive and unified Democratic message” has yet to be discovered, well, sure. Still, you could hear behind many of Tuesday’s speeches echoes of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 slogan, “Let’s get America moving again.” The idea was that Trump and the GOP are ignoring the problems most voters care about, or are making them worse.
And as The Post’s liberal blogger Greg Sargent has insisted, anyone who explores what Democratic candidates on the ground are campaigning on will notice how much they’re emphasizing bread-and-butter concerns.
At In These Times, Branko Marcetic writes—The Only Explanation for Why the NRA Has Chosen Oliver North as its New President:
It hasn’t exactly been a banner year for the National Rifle Association (NRA). Rattled by the outpouring of student activism that followed the February Parkland school shooting, the organization has floundered for a responseto grassroots anger, and has seen its popularity plummet to the lowest point in decades. It’s hard to see how it could sink any lower.
Or at least it was until last week, when the NRA announced that Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame would join the organization as its new president.
Although having worked as a radio host and television news contributor for the past twenty years, North is and likely forever will be most associated with the three-decade-old political scandal that shot him to infamy.
But far from the PR gaffe it seems at first sight, the decision to place him at the helm of the NRA may portend something else entirely: that the NRA is jettisoning mainstream acceptability entirely to instead serve as the new vanguard of the conservative movement. [...]
The NRA isn’t going to be winning any PR battles by choosing as president a man who not only violated U.S. law and tried to cover it up, but also personally enriched himself and his associates through the scheme while working with people designated by the U.S. government as terrorists. This is especially the case given that North’s crime—smuggling weapons in order to continue a campaign of mass murder—is an image one would think the NRA desperately wants not to be associated with.
At Jacobin, Jennifer Carlson writes—NRA propaganda hearkens back to an imagined past of white picket fences and financial security. In doing so, it whitewashes the history of guns in American life:
Since 1975, when the National Rifle Association formally entered political lobbying with the founding of its Institution for Legislative Action, the organization has never shied away from electrifyingly fearsome rhetoric. It has used racially loaded images of common street criminals and rioters to demonstrate the necessity of gun rights, and it has used Hollywood elites, Islamic extremists, and violent leftist mobs to insist on the precarity of those same rights.
The NRA’s propaganda makes it all too easy to reduce the organization and its members to classic fearmongers. And no doubt, this aspect is crucial to understanding the organization. But alongside its confrontational rhetoric is a more proactive moral vision, one that articulates a vision of the “real” America — one defined not by what the NRA stands against but rather what it stands for.
In this vision, gun owners lay claim to a particular vision of the social order. Instead of a community beset by “thugs,” “elitists,” and “Islamic extremists,” this image of America promises a return to a bygone era of good neighbors and white picket fences. This nostalgic idea plays an equally central role in the organization’s moral project as its better-known, more aggressive, and oppositional rhetoric. [...]
The [NRA’s “17 “Good Guys”] videos paint a picture of a lost Mayberry: gone are the days of family stability, happy childhoods, doing unto others, and trusting your neighbors. The narrative is deliberately color blind, implicitly evoking the white picket fences of white, middle-class American suburbia; unsurprisingly, it doesn’t mention the forces of racism that kept Mayberry America outside the reach of many people of color. Instead, amid the decline of this nostalgic vision of America, viewers are told that they are (to borrow the title of sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s latest book) “strangers in their own land.”
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—The Senate gave Scott Pruitt third-degree burns:
The Environmental Protection Agency administrator has shown a knack for verbal gymnastics, particularly in his handling of myriad ethics scandals. But he flopped on Wednesday while being grilled by the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Democratic Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico asked Pruitt about reports that he ordered his motorcade to deploy lights and sirens to cut through D.C. traffic. “There are policies in place that govern the use of lights” that “were followed to the best of my knowledge,” Pruitt replied. Asked again whether he ordered sirens, Pruitt said he did “not recall that happening.” Udall then revealed an internal EPA email in which Pruitt’s former head of security said Pruitt “personally encouraged” the use of sirens.
At the beginning of Wednesday’s hearing, Pruitt admitted that some of the many reports of his excessive spending were true and regrettable. “There have been decisions over the last 16 months or so that, as I look back on those decisions, I would not make the same decisions again,” he said. Pruitt cited the $43,000 soundproof phone booth he had installed in his office as an example.
He made other damaging admissions. When Udall asked Pruitt if one of his aides, Milan Hupp, worked without pay to find housing for the administrator, Pruitt said she did. “[That’s] a violation of federal law,” Udall replied.
Rebecca Leber at Mother Jones writes—Scott Pruitt Just Testified Before Congress. It Didn’t Go Well:
Given an opportunity to address the scandals that have dominated his 16 months at the head of at the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt admitted Wednesday, “I would not make the same decisions again.” It was the only time in the two-hour Senate hearing that Pruitt took any responsibility for the decisions that have led to at least 14 federal investigations into his ethical conduct, alleged retaliation against whistleblowers, and extravagant spending.
Pruitt didn’t elaborate on his regrets. Instead, he made ample use of the passive voice when discussing specific issues raised by Senate Democrats. For instance, in addressing the secure phone booth that was installed in his office at a cost of $43,000 to taxpayers, he said, “There were not proper controls early to ensure a legal review.” [...]
Pruitt was ridiculed for another of his professional extravagances: flying in first class. The EPA has maintained that his flight upgrades were necessary for his safety after he had been heckled. “What a silly reason,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) remarked in his opening statement. “Nobody even knows who you are…You have to fly first class? Oh, come on.”
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—America’s Dismal Turning Point:
Austin Frakt had a very interesting piece in the Upshot the other day, on U.S. health spending – and U.S. health — in international perspective. Everyone knows that U.S. spending is more or less literally off the charts compared with everyone else, while many are aware that we have also diverged, in the wrong direction, on measures like life expectancy: we’re falling further than further behind the rest of the advanced world.
What Frakt points out is that it was not always thus. The dismal U.S. combination of high costs and poor results only began to emerge around 1980, which poses a mystery
What changed? In a subsequent post, Frakt suggests that U.S. exceptionalism may be related to income inequality. And it’s true that income inequality began its huge rise just about the same time that U.S. health care apparently went off the rails.
Lucian K. Truscott IV at Salon writes—We are trapped in a news cycle that tracks like a disturbing Mescaline flashback:
If every day in Trumpland feels like a mescaline flashback, it’s because we’ve been here before.
Richard Nixon ran for office in 1968 talking about “peace in our time” and a “secret plan” to end the war. In March of 1969, just one month after taking office, he ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia, dropping more bombs on that country in the next 14 months than we dropped during all of World War II. The 48th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State, when “to keep the peace,” National Guardsmen opened fire on student demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine was just over a week ago. One month from now will be the 46th anniversary of the break in by the White House “plumbers” at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. in 1972, a crime overseen by the man who ran for the presidency on a platform of “law and order.”
The levels of lying, duplicity, hypocrisy, and outright criminality are about the same, and covering Trump is unnervingly reminiscent of covering Nixon. There is the same feeling that the whole thing is a mescaline dreamscape from which you can’t come down. Everything is too bright, too fast, too weird. Every time you think you’ve reached a pinnacle in the story, it keeps going up and up and up. Revelations about Russian oligarchs morph into tales about strippers and Playboy playmates, which morph into secret meetings on islands in the Indian Ocean, which turn into millions of dollars skimmed off billion dollar Russian oil deals.
James Bovard at USA Today writes—Spare me claims Gina Haspel will 'speak truth to power'. Real truth-tellers go to jail:
In the Senate Intelligence Committee secret vote today on whether to confirm Trump nominee Gina Haspel as chief of the CIA, she will likely again be praised for promising to “speak truth to power.” This has recently become one of the favorite accolades in the least trusted city in America. But will Americans be as gullible this time around?
When 7-term congressman and dutiful Republican functionary Porter Goss was nominated in 2004 to become CIA chief, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) endorsed him after he promised to “always speak truth to power.” Fat chance: after he was confirmed, Goss speedily sent a memo to CIA employees muzzling them, declaring that their job was to "support the administration and its policies in our work.” Goss bungled the CIA so badly that the Bush administration heaved him out after less than two years on the job; Goss later became a lobbyist for the Turkish government.
“Speaks truth to power” had a starring role in the 2005 Senate coronation of John Negroponte, America’s first Director of National Intelligence. While working as Reagan’s ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte perennially denied that the Honduran regime was committing vast atrocities, despite its killing of tens of thousands of its own citizens. (Honduras was aiding the Nicaraguan Contras at the time.) But that did not deter Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., and Sen. Mikulski from recycling the “truth to power” phrase in speeches endorsing Negroponte.
When Michael Hayden was nominated as CIA chief in 2006, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) vouched that Hayden would “speak truth to power.” But Hayden profoundly misled Congress regarding the CIA’s torture program and his credibility was demolished in the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the enhanced interrogation program.
Linda Martín Alcoff is a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, Hunter College, and the author of Rape and Resistance. At The New York Times, she writes This Is Not Just About Junot Díaz:
For those of us who have been fighting for decades against the oppression, emotional manipulation and brutalizing of women, as well as the murders, misrepresentations and wrongful imprisonment of all people of color, the case of the Dominican-American author Junot Díaz is a particularly difficult one.
This week I signed an open letter, along with a group of Latina scholars and writers, that criticizes the media thrashing of Mr. Díaz that has taken place since accusations of sexist behavior and sexual misconduct against him became widely public.
In the letter, we make clear that we by no means dismiss these accusations — which include forcibly kissing the writer Zinzi Clemmons and verbally abusing other women — or the serious damaging effects of the sort of behavior of which Mr. Díaz has been accused. But we do object to what we characterize in the letter as “a full-blown media-harassment campaign” that has followed the accusations, in which the writer has been cast as “a bizarre person, a sexual predator, a virulent misogynist, an abuser and an aggressor.”
While the episode has so far focused on Mr. Díaz, I also believe that it forcefully raises a broader issue: That we have a responsibility to think about the future — specifically, a future in which repentant sexists might have a place.
Constitutional lawyer Harry Litman at the Los Angeles Times writes—Mueller's investigation isn't going to 'wrap up' soon — and Trump is still in peril:
"Wrap it up" advocates can point to a slight uptick in Trump's approval ratings, and a downtick in public support for the investigation. They seem to think that if Mueller doesn't close up shop soon in response to political pressure, Trump's position is strong enough that he could put an end to it, perhaps by firing the special counsel or the special counsel's boss, Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein, and weather any storm the move occasions.
They're wrong. The probe isn't going to end soon, simply or painlessly for this president. Trump remains in great peril.
Anyone paying attention over the last year knows Mueller will not yield to political pressure. His investigators haven't leaked; they have ignored vicious personal attacks; they haven't veered in the slightest from prosecutorial professionalism.
Jason Blevins at High Country News writes—A hedge-fund owner is ‘murdering The Denver Post’:
As a bright-eyed kid with a ponytail and poorly trussed tie, I walked beneath that inscription every workday of my first decade at The Denver Post. Etched in stone at the newspaper’s former downtown office, it imbued a sense of purpose and privilege to all who entered. The lofty hope it espoused — that newspaper reporting can champion truth, meaning and a sense of community — has withered under the watch of Heath Freeman, the pernicious hedge-fund owner who is murdering the paper.
Over 21 years, I weathered more than a dozen buyouts, as The Denver Postadjusted to the changing business of newspapering. When I was hired on as an intern chasing the ultimate gig in 1997, there were more than 300 journalists in the newsroom. The latest battlefield amputations by Freeman — spurred not by need but by punitive greed after the paper missed its annual budget by a few percentage points this spring — have slashed that count to less than 60, leaving about 35 reporters and photographers as the gasping “Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire.”
Freeman is the head of Alden Global Capital, the firm that bought the Post’s parent company, the debt-addled MediaNews Group, in 2010. Over the last few years, Freeman’s vindictive hacking became too much for me. I could no longer reconcile my heart-and-soul labor with such an asshat owner. I bailed in April, and since then the exodus has grown, as a masthead of journalists — some of the very best in Colorado — flee Freeman’s foul domain.
Smart people say there are stages of grief. So far, I’ve occupied one: anger. And I’m not moving on anytime soon.
Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian writes— A broken idea of sex is flourishing. Blame capitalism:
Since the Toronto bloodbath, a lot of pundits have belatedly awoken to the existence of the “incel” (short for involuntary celibate) online subculture and much has been said about it. Too often, it has been treated as some alien, unfamiliar worldview. It’s really just an extreme version of sex under capitalism we’re all familiar with because it’s all around us in everything, everywhere and has been for a very long time. And maybe the problem with sex is capitalism.
What’s at the bottom of the incel worldview: sex is a commodity, accumulation of this commodity enhances a man’s status, and every man has a right to accumulation, but women are in some mysterious way obstacles to this, and they are therefore the enemy as well as the commodity. They want high-status women, are furious at their own low status, but don’t question the system that allocates status and commodifies us all in ways that are painful and dehumanizing. [...]
If you regard women as people endowed with certain inalienable rights, then heterosexual sex – as distinct from rape – has to be something two people do together because both of them want to, but this notion of women as people is apparently baffling or objectionable to hordes of men – not just incels.
Dave Weigel and Michael Scherer at The Washington Post write—The revolution is real, but it’s unclear whether Sanders will lead it:
While Sanders hasn’t dominated the Democratic Party, his ideas have made huge inroads.
“What Bernie’s doing now is seeding what we’re going to do in November,” said Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), one of a handful of congressmen who endorsed Sanders for president. “Even in those districts where somebody’s going to lose, you’ve got to keep people activated. It’s a different kind of trickle-down.” [...]
The result is a bench of candidates who owe little to Sanders personally — and do not inherit his feuds with the party establishment — but endorse his strategy of motivating liberal voters instead of tacking right. Democratic strategists say that is partly by design, as Sanders has focused more on transforming Democratic orthodoxy than on promoting the party.
The idea of expanding Medicare to cover all Americans, a Democratic outlier in 2016, has been embraced by a majority of House Democrats and most of the Democratic senators considering a presidential bid. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently endorsed legalizing marijuana across the country, and Democrats have largely signed on to the idea of new federal subsidies to pay all or part of the cost of higher education.