Thursday, February 22, 2024

All the news that's fit to print (on page A16)

Josh Marshall calls it A Bigger Story Than You Can Possibly Imagine

Let’s review recent events. First came the news that prosecutors in special counsel David Weiss’s office had decided that the confidential FBI informant who had been one of Biden’s top accusers had been lying and that they were charging him for lying to the FBI. That next step is critical. Informants lie to prosecutors all the time. They seldom get charged. It’s one standard to decide your informant isn’t telling the truth and/or won’t hold up at trial. It’s an entirely different one to think that you can prove they knowingly lied beyond a reasonable doubt. Clearly investigators felt they had caught Alexander Smirnov dead to rights. Yesterday came news that Smirnov has admitted that he got his false stories from Russian intelligence officers. Smirnov isn’t just at the center of the DOJ investigation, he’s at the center of what we have to generously call James Comer’s House inquiry, the premise for Joe Biden’s increasingly wobbly impeachment. 

 Covered in more detail by TPM's David Kurtz here.

This is blowing up all over. As I'm writing this, NPR is using this as the lead for their news wrap-up. It's the top story on CNN's site.


And the New York Times has Hunter Biden on the front page... 


I'm sorry. It appears that the NYT picked this moment to run a not particularly topical or newsworthy story about Hunter's rich friend, but, to be fair, they have run some articles on this widening scandal around the main informant behind the legend of the Biden crime family, one of the defining myths of the 2024 GOP.

 

 

In case you're having trouble reading this, the page numbers in chronological order were A11, A15, A16 and A1.

The paper has another story scheduled for tomorrow (no page number as yet).  Their Smirnov coverage has become a subject of mockery and they are having their asses handed to them by pretty much everybody. Based on past experience (anybody else remember Pam Bondi?), this is about the time the paper will push the story to the front page, ignoring the work of other organizations and pretending they were in the lead all along. 

We'll see.

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Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Josh Marshall eviscerated Ezra Klein, but he did miss one or two major organs

Marshall is a common ground kind of guy so it is unusual for him to go after a colleague, particularly in one as respected as Klein without conceding that at least one are two secondary points have some merit, but he's not giving any ground here ("No. Ezra Klein is Completely Wrong. Here’s Why.")and quite rightly so.  Barring a few examples from writers with obvious ideological axes to grind, this may be the worst piece of political analysis I have ever seen from the New York Times, a paper which in recent memory has told us that Obama was toast in 2012, Trump couldn't possibly get the nomination in 2016, DeSantis was unstoppable in 2022, and Nikki Haley was building up real momentum in late 2023.

Klein starts out by arguing that Biden has been an excellent president and is completely up to the job, strongly implying, perhaps even saying outright (I'd need to go back and double check) that he is the best choice for governing.  This goes on for about a third of the essay before taking a sharp left turn and claiming that our only hope of keeping Trump of the White House is for Biden to step down and to have the Democratic nominee decided by what Josh Marshall calls a thunderdome convention.  

I use the word claim because you can't really call this an argument.  It is, at best, an argument-shaped thing like what you might get from chat GPT on a bad day.  It is a concatenation of strawmen, anecdotes that don't actually address the matter at hand, and underwear gnome planning.  Probably the most interesting and possibly important aspect of this essay has little to do with the points being made in the original piece and more to do with how something this bad could be penned by someone as intelligent an experienced as as for climb and how so many otherwise smart people could take it so seriously.

I'll try to come back to that in another post.  For now, there are a couple of major flaws with the thunderdome argument which Marshall does not get around to addressing (and you really should read Marshall's piece before going any further).

Let's start with Klein's description of how he thinks the process might go:

Still, it is the party’s job to organize victory. If Harris cannot convince delegates that she has the best shot at victory, she should not and probably would not be chosen. And I don’t think that would rip the party apart. There is a ton of talent in the Democratic Party right now: Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Jared Polis, Gavin Newsom, Raphael Warnock, Josh Shapiro, Cory Booker, Ro Khanna, Pete Buttigieg, Gina Raimondo [Be honest. Was I the only one who had to look this one up? -- MP], Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Murphy, Andy Beshear, J.B. Pritzker — the list goes on.

Some of them would make a run at the nomination. They would give speeches at the convention, and people would actually pay attention. The whole country would be watching the Democratic convention, and probably quite a bit happening in the run-up to it, and seeing what this murderer’s row of political talent could actually do. And then some ticket would be chosen based on how those people did.

Could it go badly? Sure. But that doesn’t mean it will go badly. It could make the Democrats into the most exciting political show on earth. And over there on the other side will be Trump getting nominated and a who’s who of MAGA types slavering over his leadership. The best of the Democratic Party against the worst of the Republican Party. A party that actually listened to the voters against a party that denies the outcome of the elections. A party that did something different over a party that has again nominated a threat to democracy who has never — not once — won the popular vote in a general election.

That seems like an OK contrast to me.

The might-not-go-badly standard isn't all that reassuring, especially given that in 2024 bad = disastrous. One could argue that the 1968 Democratic Convention was the most exciting political show on earth. Bitter fights and deep rifts make for great ratings. Klein acknowledges that '68 was a disaster, then waves away the possibility of history repeating itself despite a militant anti-war faction once again being a problem for the party.

Given this and all the other ways that a thunderdome convention can go badly, I'd personally give the possibility of a dumpster fire better than even money, but even if the convention goes smoothly, is this process likely to give us the most electable candidate? 

There are lots of reason to be skeptical, but I'll focus on just one, vetting. Who on that "murderer’s row of political talent" has the nation actually taken a good look at?  Booker, Buttigieg, and Ocasio-Cortez are the only names that jump out at me. The there are a couple of famous unknowns, Whitmer and Newsom, politicians who have been widely seen but not widely scrutinized.

Like most people, I don't actually know that much about Whitmer, but I have had a chance to study Newsom and, as mentioned before, vetting is not his friend.

Really not his friend.


Newsom can't be the only one on Klein's list who looks better from a distance, but how likely are we to be able to distinguish the gilded from the gold in a few rushed and chaotic days driven by an ever growing sense of panic and guided by a press corps that has gotten virtually every major political story wrong for the past decade or so?


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Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Libertarianism

This is Joseph.

This little chart has been making the rounds: 


It is so incredibly naive about how the world would actually work. It basically presumes that you can pass the duties of government to private corporations. Here are just a few of the obvious failure points:

  1. It presumes that Ring and ADT (the private security companies) are relatively equal in strength. Otherwise war (or just refusing to participate) might be cheaper. What if it is suicidal for ADT to attack Ring for one subscriber?
  2. It presumes that the investigation will be fair given that information may not be shared and that the Walter character is able to be investigated by an outside company. 
  3. Relevant to point one, it presumes that one company getting larger will not end up dominating the market. Once a company is large enough, it can start ignoring the smaller companies so everyone needs to subscribe to the big one. This is a failure point of decentralized legal systems (e.g., Medieval Iceland) across history. 
  4. It assumes that anybody involved cares about a fair arbitrator. What if they are unfair? What is the recourse?
  5. In the end, the other key point is that you need a regulated market to enforce all of these contracts. Who is regulating the market? Because if it is the government then you don't need the companies. 
  6. Relevant to point 5, just refusing to pay is a hard thing to counter in this set-up. What if Ring decides that it is good for its marketing not to allow Walter to be punished? Don't we end up in a war? 
  7. Finally, this is a recipe for fragmentation. The whole idea of personal loyalty, reputation, and interpersonal connections is how the middle ages worked. It's going to struggle if it meets a unified state. It's also a terrible idea for a large country (like the United States). It isn't an accident that decentralized law shows up in Iceland. By 1700, the population was only 50,000 (which is smaller than a small US city) which makes a fragmented personal relationship society much more viable (the whole country is one large town). 
Anyway, this was so bad I felt the need to add comments. But as the original post noted, this was demolished by the original libertarian theorists, who were well aware of how warlords and criminal gangs worked. 

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Monday, February 19, 2024

To Russia, with Love

As previously mentioned, the GOP has spent a couple of weeks being very nice to Vladimir Putin, between tossing Ukraine to the wolves, threatening NATO, and Tucker Carlson wrapping up his Russia, land of enchantment series.








Though it should be noted, this has created some surprising rifts within the party.



 

And sadly, this MAGA love has gone largely unrequited.




That's where we were last week. With a handful of exceptions, the party had very publicly gone all in on Russia, which made it a particularly bad time for Putin to shock the world with an especially evil act like...








Republicans (with the aforementioned handful of exceptions) have responded with one of the following:

1. Deafening silence



2. What murder?




3. Yeah, but what about Biden?

As noted by Bradley P. Moss "Navalny was poisoned on Trump’s watch, and imprisoned again on Trump’s watch."






On a related note,the horseshoe tip of the far left has weighed in.


And finally...

4. Good riddance to a woke Nazi


Noted Brexiter.

Murdoch favorite.

We'll close with this reminder of where the Republican Party used to be. .
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Friday, February 16, 2024

Performers have been complaining about political correctness for a long time

I have to confess I was never that big of a fan of Freberg. While clever, compared to his contemporaries Bob and Ray and the Goons, his material feels dated, but perhaps for that reason, his work gives a much better read on the post-war era.

1957 Stan Freberg - Elderly Man River (with Daws Butler & Billy May orch.)





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Thursday, February 15, 2024

Bothsides is an easy way to score points but ignore the main points

This is Joseph.

I am a bit puzzled at the recent discourse going into the next US presidential election. Here is Jon Stewart managing to create an equivalence narrative between Joe Biden and Donald Trump:


It is not that the Biden age issue isn't a point. I am getting older and it is sad to see my options and opportunities go away. I think, though, that the policy stakes are being really underplayed here and the focus is instead on the one issue that the two parties can both be criticized on.

Mark pointed this post out:


It's a little harsh but not completely unfair. 

Here is Josh Marshall:

The challenge of Bothsideism is that it makes you look wise and considered but at the cost of obscuring the issues. Ironically, the best line of attack here has been from Nikki Haley who has tried to portray both candidates as too old in the context of nominate her and not Trump. It probably isn't a terrible argument for a partisan Republican to make (highlighting her strengths) but the argument about age ignores many other contentious issues that the Trump presidency raises. 

I hope that we see better in the days to come. 
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Wednesday, February 14, 2024

When threads collide...

This New York Magazine profile hits lots of our old friends.

There is, of course, Bill Ackman.

Then there's Avi Loeb, formerly noted astrophysicist, now UFO loon.

Plus Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

That night, Ackman and Oxman hosted a dinner at their Upper West Side apartment, a gathering of World Minds, an “invitation-only community” funded by the media conglomerate Axel Springer that is a kind of rotating series of Davos-lite dinner parties — the kind of places where VIPs discuss the world’s problems over cocktails (Oxman is a member of the group’s advisory board). The featured guests were two members of the World Minds network: David Petraeus, former CIA director and current partner at the private-equity firm KKR, and Avi Loeb, an Israeli astrophysicist at Harvard. The war in Gaza had been raging for a month, and Petraeus gave a dispiriting talk about the broader geopolitical fallout. Later in the evening, in a call for dialogue among different tribes, Paola Antonelli, a curator at MoMA, offered a thought. “Love the aliens!” she said.

Loeb took the idea and suggested looking for hope from above. “My personal belief is that the Messiah will arrive, not necessarily from Brooklyn, as some Orthodox Jews believe, but rather from outer space,” Loeb told the group. The extraterrestrial Messiah’s message, he said, would be to stop fighting over territory here “because there is much more real estate available throughout the universe.” Back on Earth, Loeb listened while Ackman said he was hopeful that Gay would respond to his letter. “I’m a theoretical physicist, so I get paid to make predictions, and I said to him, ‘I don’t think you will,’” Loeb told me. “The last thing Harvard would do is admit their mistakes.”

Ackman believes that our lives are often fated from birth. “I have a view that people become their names,” he told me. “Like, I’ve met people named Hamburger that own McDonald’s franchises.” We’d been talking for nearly an hour and a half when Ackman asked me what my name was, hoping to offer a diagnosis. After he seemed momentarily stumped by my surname, I offered him my first name, which he misheard as Reed. “Read … write,” he said, before turning back to himself. “So, my name is Ackman — it’s like Activist Man.”

...

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Ackman joined a Twitter Spaces conversation with Elon Musk and Dean Phillips, the Minnesota representative running a long-shot campaign against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination. Ackman had endorsed Phillips, and he told the 20,000 listeners, including the accounts for Marjorie Taylor Greene and @EndWokeness, that he was “ashamed” of today’s Democratic Party. He has predicted that Trump will win if Biden is the Democratic candidate. Before settling on Phillips, Ackman had looked for alternatives in Harvard graduate Vivek Ramaswamy, Harvard graduate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Harvard graduate Jamie Dimon, whom he had encouraged to make a run. Would Ackman, another Harvard graduate, ever consider running himself? Some of his friends think he might. “He’s going through a period of growth — a period of expansion — because it turns out this political activism is quite fun, and I believe the adulation he feels will push him to do a lot more of it,” the longtime Ackman associate told me. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see him running for office. And if you ask what office, you don’t know Bill Ackman.” Ackman himself said in December that “if the country wanted me at some point, I would be open to it.”

The profile also links to a fun Vanity Fair piece that includes the following.

“Ackman seems to have this ‘Superman complex,’ ” says Chapman Capital’s Robert Chapman, who was one of the investors on the other side of Ackman’s bet. “If he jumped off a building in pursuit of super-human powered flight but then slammed to the ground, I’m pretty sure he’d blame the unanticipated and unfair force of gravity.”


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Tuesday, February 13, 2024

High-speed rail circa 1907

An interesting look at how people looked at advances in transportation around the turn of the last century. From the 1907/03/09 Scientific American. [Emphasis added]









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