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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The unreal city [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-14
We begin today with Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage of The New York Times reporting about the release of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report about the tacky shoe salesman’s efforts to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
The Justice Department delivered the 137-page volume — representing half of Mr. Smith’s overall final report, with the volume about Mr. Trump’s other federal case, accusing him of mishandling classified documents, still confidential — to Congress just after midnight on Tuesday. The report amounted to an extraordinary rebuke of a president-elect, capping a momentous legal saga that saw the man now poised to regain the powers of the nation’s highest office charged with crimes that struck at the heart of American democracy. And although Mr. Smith resigned as special counsel late last week, his recounting of the case also served as a reminder of the vast array of evidence and detailed accounting of Mr. Trump’s actions that he had marshaled. In his report, Mr. Smith took Mr. Trump to task not only for his efforts to reverse the results of a free and fair election, but also for consistently encouraging “violence against his perceived opponents” throughout the chaotic weeks between Election Day and Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, injuring more than 140 police officers. Mr. Smith laid the attack on the Capitol squarely at Mr. Trump’s feet, quoting from the evidence in several criminal cases of people charged with taking part in the riot who made clear that they believed they were acting on Mr. Trump’s behalf.
Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic thinks that the very idea that Trump voters supported him because of Democratic“neoliberalism” should die in the aftermath of the Biden/Harris loss in 2024.
People tend to believe that events with profound consequences must have profound sources. The shock of Trump’s 2016 victory led many Democrats to search for an origin story that matched the scope of such a traumatic outcome. A belief took hold, especially on the party’s economic left wing, that working-class voters had revolted against an economic order perpetuated by Democrats and Republicans alike. In this telling, every president since at least Ronald Reagan had governed in the service of corporations and wealthy elites, at the expense of ordinary Americans and “left behind” places. After all, Trump had pulled off his surprise Rust Belt sweep while denouncing free-trade deals and intermittently posing as an enemy of Wall Street. Defeating him would consequently require reestablishing a full-fledged populist program rather than the warmed-over variety of the Clinton and Obama years. This theory always contained fatal flaws. The Democrats had maintained a coalition divided between business and labor since Franklin D. Roosevelt—who also established the modern free-trade order. The recent versions of the two parties did narrowly agree on a handful of policies, including the virtues of globalization, but starting with the Reagan era, they had grown more divided, not more united, on economics. Barack Obama had bailed out the auto industry, regulated Wall Street, and redistributed hundreds of billions of dollars from the rich to the poor. Even Bill Clinton had engaged in bitter showdowns over taxes and spending. The notion that Clinton and Newt Gingrich, or Obama and Paul Ryan, were partners with a shared ideology that could be usefully defined by a single term ignores almost everything that happened during these years. It is a measure of the incoherence of “neoliberalism” that the term can be, and has been, applied as an epithet to almost anything: Paul Krugman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, public-employee unions, Beatles fandom. [...] Still, the narrative that neoliberalism was to blame took hold widely—including, most fatefully, during the Biden administration. Even though Biden had served as Obama’s vice president, and won the nomination in large part because Democratic voters looked back on that partnership with fondness, he filled his administration with staffers who believed that Obama and Bill Clinton had failed the working class. The administration’s policies accordingly departed in ways that those post-neoliberal theorists deemed especially important. Biden supported organized labor almost unconditionally, even in policy areas that conflicted with other liberal priorities; pulled back on unfettered free trade; gave policy-making roles to lawyers over economists; and appointed crusading reformers to the top antitrust-enforcement positions. Perhaps most important, the administration saw its subsidies for green energy and chip manufacturing not merely as targeted responses to market failures but as the core of a new industrial policy that would restore prosperity to large swaths of America.
I wouldn’t mind retiring the word “populism,” as well.
Current Santa Monica, CA resident Heather Digby Parton writes for Salon horrified (and a bit surprised) at the callousness and cruelty of Republicans about the wildfires.
And when you're sitting in front of your TV waiting to find out if you have to run for your life, once again realizing that we have just empowered an ignorant, mendacious cretin who's planning to not just dismantle every attempt to mitigate the damage but actually exacerbate the threat, you just dissolve into despair and anger. How can we just let this happen? Californians are used to being bashed by Republican politicians and some of their supporters. It's always popular to mock us and use us as the poster children for everything that's wrong with America. I don't think most of us really care much about that, which is probably one reason they're so frustrated with us. We know that despite our problems, as any place that has nearly 40 million people in it would have, it's a really pretty great place and those who don't care for us are welcome to their opinion. But I confess that I am shocked at the monumental lack of grace, empathy and compassion coming from the right as this horrific emergency unfolds. I know that it's human nature to point fingers and there are no doubt many mistakes that we will find as the city recovers. It is also natural in such fast-moving emergencies that wrong information will be disseminated even by officials you rely on. (At one point an evacuation notice went out to all of LA County by mistake!) But no disaster response operates perfectly and a thorough after-action investigation, reforms, accountability etc. are all to be expected. If heads have to roll then they will, I'm sure. But the right-wing media, influencers and Republican politicians have been stunningly callous about this ghastly event, even for them.
Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review critiques the high-quality local media coverage of the Southern California fires says in the face of a now-decimated legacy media “information ecosystem.”
Paul Krugman writes for his “Krugman Wonks Out” Substack reminding us of just how much America relies on California.
..California is...an economic and technological powerhouse; without it America would be a lot poorer and weaker than it is. Most narrowly, at a time when Donald Trump is making nonsensical claims that America is subsidizing Canada via our bilateral trade deficit, California is literally subsidizing the rest of the United States, red states in particular, through the federal budget. The Rockefeller Institute regularly calculates states’ balance of payments — the difference between the amount the federal government spends in a state and the amount the state pays in federal taxes… [...} California paid in a lot more than it got back — $83 billion in total. So did Washington state and much of the Northeast. Most red states were in the reverse position, getting much more from DC than they paid in return. And yes, it’s ironic that states that are so dependent on transfers from other states — if West Virginia were a country, it would in effect be receiving foreign aid equal to more than 20 percent of its GDP — vote overwhelmingly for politicians trying to eviscerate the programs they depend on. Even some Republicans have noticed how blue states subsidize red states — here’s a New York Republican lashing out at South Carolina.
Caitlin Reilly of Roll Call writes about the proposed tax and deep spending cuts being proposed by the House.
A menu of more than $5 trillion in potential spending cuts circulated by House Budget Republicans became public this week. The list of possible cuts draws heavily on Medicaid, the joint federal-state health care benefit for the poor, food stamps and other social welfare programs. The document is causing a stir among Democrats and progressive groups, who are already pouncing although Republicans haven’t yet unveiled a draft bill or said which proposals they favor. House Democrats’ campaign arm and party lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol released a series of blistering statements after the outline became public. [...] Democrats are likely to seize on another document, released Friday by the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis, to bolster their case that Republicans are looking out for wealthy donors. The report compares the cost and distributional effects of extending all of the expiring individual tax cuts to extending the tax breaks just for those making less than $400,000, as Democrats vowed on the campaign trail.
Jane Meyer of The New Yorker notes the Republican campaign to support the nomination of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.
The Trump team’s efforts to crush dissent range from public-media campaigns targeting vulnerable senators in conservative states (and paid for by unelected billionaires) to more underhanded tactics aimed at intimidating and discrediting potentially hostile witnesses. Hegseth’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore, for instance, has threatened to sue Jane Doe, Hegseth’s anonymous rape accuser, and her lawyer for defamation if her allegations prevent him from being confirmed. So far, it appears that such tactics may be working. Several potential witnesses, including the accuser, have declined to speak out publicly and have elected not to testify at Tuesday’s hearing. Republican senators have disparaged anonymous critics of Hegseth. But some of these senators have also declined to speak face to face and confidentially with such critics, including the woman who accused Hegseth of rape. According to three sources with knowledge of the situation, Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, is one of the senators who have turned down offers to hear privately from Hegseth’s accuser. Ernst is a pro-Trump conservative on the Armed Services Committeee, and her vote is seen as the linchpin to Hegseth’s confirmation, because she is both a military veteran and a survivor of sexual assault who has championed women’s rights. (Ernst’s office did not respond to questions from The New Yorker about her refusal to see Hegseth’s accuser.) Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine, also declined an offer to meet with the alleged victim. Collins’s press secretary, Blake Kernen, confirmed the outreach but said that the senator believes that such allegations should be brought to the relevant committee—in this case, the Armed Services Committee—of which she is not a member. Collins has, however, met with Hegseth. Afterward, she saidshe would wait to decide on his nomination until he had undergone an F.B.I. background check and his confirmation hearing. Julie Roginsky, the co-founder, along with the former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, of Lift Our Voices, a nonprofit that fights against the silencing of victims of sexual misconduct, told me, “For senators not to allow a sexual-assault survivor to speak to them is unconscionable. She should be allowed to tell her story.” But a source who tried to broker one such meeting described the Republican senators as “just plain scared of Trump.”
Francesca Paris of The New York Times notes that child vaccination rates were falling even prior to RFK Jr.s popularity
Nationwide, the rate of kindergartners with complete records for the measles vaccine declined from around 95 percent before the pandemic to under 93 percent last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Immunization rates against polio, whooping cough and chickenpox fell similarly. Average rates remain high, but those national figures mask far more precipitous drops in some states, counties and school districts. In those areas, falling vaccination rates are creating new pockets of students no longer protected by herd immunity, the range considered high enough to stop an outbreak. For a community, an outbreak can be extremely disruptive. For children, measles and other once-common childhood diseases can lead to hospitalizationand life-threatening complications. Immunization rates fell in most states early in the pandemic, and continued to fall in the years that followed.
Finally today, Daniel Menéndez López of El País in English attempts to explain the right-wing fascination with one Theodore Kaczynski.
Of all the corners of social media and its various fads, few are more extravagant than the posts about Kaczynski. Photos and videos with catchy, pounding music show his ramshackle shelter, his homemade bombs, passages from his manifesto, his police record, and his identikit. There are profiles that encourage people to take the “Ted-pill,” a reference to The Matrix, in which the protagonist Neo escapes from his mental-dream prison after ingesting a red pill. In this case, the pill symbolizes rejecting the industrial world and its consequences. As Baudelaire wrote, man advances through forest-groves of symbols, strange and solemn, who follow him with their familiar glances. [...] If the German philosopher Max Müller was right when he argued that, both in modern times and in Homer’s era, we live in the shadow of myths — we just don’t recognize them — Ted Kaczynski can be considered one of these myths. Initially influential among many in radical environmental movements for his technophobic views, Kaczynski’s vehement criticism of “leftism” has recently gained traction within far-right circles. The Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people and injured over 300, plagiarized large portions of Kaczynski’s manifesto. In 2018, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn translated his work. A now-deleted audiobook was created by Augustus Invictus, a notorious American white supremacist. Elon Musk tweeted that Kaczynski “might not be wrong,” and the controversial U.S. commentator Tucker Carlson remarked, “bad person, but a smart analysis.” Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4, posted a review on Goodreads of Kaczynski’s manifesto which stated: “‘Violence never solved anything’ is a phrase uttered by cowards and predators.”
Try to have the best possible day, difficult as that may be given some of the headlines.
[END]
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